the sole “sword-and-sorcery” story that Cave contributed to the pulps, written for Magic Carpet; Dark Doors of Doom, a trio of weird-menace yarns from the pages of the spicy pulps, all originally credited to Justin Case; and The Stinging ’Nting and Other Stories, four adventure yarns first published in 1931 in two pulps rarely seen today—Far East Adventure Stories and Man Stories. Black Dog’s Cave collections are digest-sized books with card-stock covers, available from the publisher for between five and nine dollars.
Although Hugh B. Cave is predominantly regarded today as a writer of dark fantasy, a large portion of his pulp era work was created for the mystery genre. At least one quarter of his pulp production was aimed at the rough-paper detective market. Beginning in 2000, modern readers were reintroduced to this versatile author’s crime fiction through three reprint collections issued by the small presses.
Fedogan & Bremer celebrated the author’s ninetieth birthday with the republication of Cave’s nine “Peter Kane” stories, originally written for Popular Publication’s Dime Detective. According to Don Hutchison’s introduction to the volume, “Kane…was introduced as (the) ‘ace shamus of the Beacon Agency, chronic drunk, two-fisted, hard-headed private dick with nothing to live for except the next drink’…a man who can down three liquid meals a day, get hit on the head more often than is really healthy, and still land on his feet right side up.”
While the first half-dozen Kane stories, originally published in 1934 and 1935, owe a large debt to the weird-menace field for which Cave had then been laboring for several years, the final three tales set a more comic tone and feature rather puzzling plots.
Dime Detective was also home to another Cave hero, truant officer Nick Coffey. The protagonist of three stories contributed to the Popular magazine in 1940, Officer Coffey was a favorite of Dime Detective’s editor Ken White as well as Cave’s agent, Lurton “Count” Blassingame. The stories concern good kids, driven into trouble via circumstances beyond their control. In 2000, Subterranean Press reissued two of the three Coffey stories in a chapbook limited to 250 numbered and 26 lettered copies, all signed by the author. The Sidecar Preservation Society issued the third Coffey story separately in 2001 as a fund-raising effort.
Black Mask was the premier detective magazine of the pulp era, the periodical where the hard-boiled detective story took root and evolved. Home to such greats of the mystery genre as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, Black Mask would also publish ten of Cave’s tales of detection, contributed to the magazine from 1934 through 1941. Ranging from the tough-guy cop of “Too Many Women,” to the greeting card executive who investigates crimes as a hobby in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” to his last story for the magazine, the Hitchcockian “Stranger in Town,” Crippen & Landru’s Long Live the Dead amply demonstrates Cave’s versatility as an author.
Although Black Mask and Dime Detective Magazine were probably the best of the many detective pulps that were published during the pulp era, it was for Detective Fiction Weekly that Cave wrote most of his crime fiction. From 1936 through 1941, he contributed sixty-three tales of mystery and detection to the Munsey magazine. Crippen & Landru’s Come Into My Parlor collects nearly a dozen of these stories, which, according to the author, were “among the best of the pulp stories I wrote.”
“What I had, in many of my tales for Detective Fiction Weekly, were folks like you and you and you, who never wore a policeman’s uniform or were licensed to be crime fighters. These characters were just everyday people who became involved in crime-fighting more or less by ‘accident.’ And when I began writing that kind of story, with a hero who was not a professional crime-fighter, but just an ordinary Joe like most of us, the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly liked them and so did the readers.”
Both Crippen & Landru volumes were published in two states—a trade paperbound edition and a limited clothbound edition, signed and numbered by the author. Included with the latter was a separate pamphlet, reprinting an additional Cave pulp story not found in the paperbound edition of that particular book.
With over eight-hundred stories moldering away in the crumbling pages of seventy-year-old magazines never meant for permanence, these seventeen collections reprinting over 130 stories have only scratched the surface of Cave’s prodigious output. Hopefully, the appearance of Cave of a Thousand Tales, a biography of the author written by Milt Thomas and released by Arkham House in June of this year, will provide the impetus for further collections of this wonderful craftsman of the pulp era.1 After all, the Arizona Kid, Wildcat and Range Wolf, and Senor Bravo are all still having “Trouble Tamin’ Tumbleweed” in the pages of Western Story Magazine and Wild West Weekly.
1 Starmont House published a short biography of Hugh Cave, Pulp Man’s Odyssey, written by Audrey Parente, in 1988. It was followed in 1994 by Cave’s autobiographical Magazines I Remember, based on his long correspondence with fellow author Carl Jacobi and published by Tattered Pages Press.
SKULLS, by H. BEDFORD-JONES
I
The entire affair occupied an incredibly short space of time, considering what was involved. It happened in a corner of the smoking room of the Empress of China, the evening before we were to dock in San Francisco.
Looking back on it now, I suppose it is impossible to convey the full shock which accompanied the ghastly denouncement of Larsen’s story, Larsen was sharing my stateroom; we were friends. He was returning after spending a year away out in western China, gathering specimens for some museum. A thin, dark, sallow man, he possessed that rare charm which comes of deep, strong character. He was full of surprises; and, I have since thought, full of an inexorable, grim puritanical sort of righteousness, as well.
Mainwaring, who occupied the odd chair in our corner of the smoking room, had taken a liking to Larsen from the start, and stuck with us the whole voyage. We liked him, also. He was lonely and homesick, poor devil, anxious to be back home. He had spent several years in the Orient, in the silk business; a big chap he was, bearded, with gently imaginative blue eyes and a great reticence of manner.
We had the place pretty much to ourselves that evening, since everyone was packing, Mainwaring showed us a couple of very fine old netsukes, abominably indecent, which he meant to bring past the customs in his pocket. At this, Larsen flushed slightly and rose.
“I’ll show you chaps something interesting,” he said, and left us.
He returned presently, bringing a small Chinese box. This he opened, and took from wads of cotton two shallow, oval bowls, handing once to each of us. I examined mine. At first I took it for rhinoceros horn; it had the same rich brown coloring and feel. Then I perceived the lines upon it, and knew the thing for what it was—the top of a skull.
“Hello!” exclaimed Mainwaring with interest. “You must have been up in Tibet to get hold of these, eh? I’ve heard the lamas use human skulls for bowls.”
“Yes and no.” Larsen lighted a cigar and leaned back in his chair, smiling oddly. “I got these at a lamasery, right enough, but it was across from the Tibetan border—up in the Lolo country in northern Yunnan.”
Mainwaring glanced up from the skull in his hands. His brows lifted in quick interest.
“Oh! By the way, did you ever hear of an expedition that got lost up in that country a couple of years ago? Three Americans—I can’t recall their names. I heard something about it at the time, but never learned whether they got out.”
Larsen nodded. His eyes held an air of singular intensity, yet his words were calm.
“Yes. Oh, yes! The Bonner party, eh? I knew old Bonner very well indeed, years ago. And his nephew Stickley; a fine chap,
