Long Live the Dead (2 page)

When I began writing, I wrote adventure stories. I was born with adventure in my genes, I guess. My English mother was born in India, where her English engineer father, George Barnett, built the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and was made a C.I.E. (Companion of the Indian Empire) by Queen Victoria for doing so. He was also Mayor of Bombay. As a nurse, mother served in the Boer War in South Africa. The man who became my father, Tom Cave, followed her to Africa and married her there. The first of their three children, my brother Tom, was born there. Then they returned to England. My brother Geoff (the original Geoffrey Vace) and I were born there in Chester.

Geoffrey Vace was a pseudonym Hugh and his brother Geoff shared for a few early pulp stories. Then Geoff (the brother) dropped out of the game. But Geoffrey (the pseudonym) made many pulp magazine appearances.

Geoffrey Vace became my second most–used pen name after my favorite pseudonym, Justin Case. It was fun to use. Ironic without being obvious. I wrote all my “spicy” stories, more than seventy of them, under that name. I also occasionally used Judy Case. My output was so great, once I hit stride in the early 1930s, that I needed pen names because I often had more than one story in the same issue of a magazine.

And this is why the title story of this Hugh B. Cave
Black Mask
collection, “Long Live the Dead,” was written by “Allen Beck”—because “Smoke in Your Eyes” appeared in that same December 1938 issue of
Black Mask
under Hugh’s real name.

For Hugh B. Cave, having two stories the same issue of a magazine was a regular occurrence. “It happened a lot,” he wrote.

But not in
Black Mask.
Getting two stories into the same issue of
Black Mask
was quite a feat, particularly under the strong editorial hand of Fanny Ellsworth, who was editor in 1938. This use of pseudonyms has led to some errors and omissions in standard sources. For example, in E. R. Hagemann’s
Comprehensive Index to Black Mask, 1920–1951
(Bowling Green State University Press), the meticulous index of record, Hugh is listed as having written only the nine stories that appeared under his own name. Professor Hagemann missed the Allen Beck pseudonym used for the title story of this collection. When I wrote and pointed out Hageman’s Allen Beck error, Hugh replied:

I’m glad you set the record straight. You are right. All of us successful writers for the pulps used pseudonyms, and often they do get hard to untangle. Then there is the problem of house names. Some publishers kept pet pen names in reserve when they wanted a different name on the cover for whatever reason. And the reason wasn’t always clear to me. I preferred to use my own pen names. But a couple of times a few of us wrote under a house name, and we still can’t figure out who wrote which story!

No matter how popular a pulp author might be, pulp editors
never
wanted to appear to publish two stories by one author in the same issue of a magazine. Although I am certain some alert
aficionado
of pulp history will write in with a few examples that are exceptions to this rule (and I welcome such letters), there was sound marketing psychology behind this standard industry policy. Pulp readers wanted as much entertainment as possible for their change. Harold Steeger built one of the greatest, longest-running pulp publishing empires, Popular Publications, with a just such a bargain strategy. He started a line of different genre magazines featuring “Dime” in each title—
Dime Detective
,
Dime Adventure
,
Dime Western
, and so on. In the early 1970s when I met with him on an almost daily basis for a number of months, he told me that the appeal to value was one of his great strategies that led to his extraordinary publishing success. In fact, Steeger’s
Dime Detective
became
Black Mask
’s only true rival. Over time, the summer of 1941 to be exact, Harold Steeger finally acquired what he told me was he prize acquisition of all,
Black Mask.

Steeger explained to me why it was accepted pulp wisdom never to include two stories under one author’s name in a single issue:

One Erle Stanley Gardner story featured on the cover of any of my magazines guaranteed an increased sales of 50,000 copies. I learned to increase my print order by about 60,000 copies to cover the assured extra demand of that name on the cover. However, two Erle Stanley Gardner stories in one issue would not increase sales one more issue above that initial 50,000 boost. I’ll tell you why. The reader wants a sure thing and a bargain. A second Erle Stanley Gardner story would only dilute the impact of the first Gardner story. Almost all readers would rather get a story by a different big name writer, rather than two stories from one big name writer. Now two stories by two different major writers is an obvious bargain. However, two stories by one major writer may also be a bargain, but it starts many potential newsstand buyers to thinking. And the last thing we want a potential buyer holding one of our magazines in his hands at the newsstand to do is to start thinking. The buyer may think: well they spent the dough to buy two Gardner stories, so why not an original Ian Fleming James Bond story, instead?

Or maybe the potential buyer starts thinking: maybe one of the two Gardner stories isn’t as good as the other. Or maybe they are both second-rate Gardner tales and they threw them both in one issue to kind of equal one great story.

It doesn’t matter what that buyer is thinking. Thinking is bad at the newsstand. We want that reader to
buy
! If our potential customer stops on his way to a purchase for any reason, another magazine may attract his eye and the sale will be lost.

So we at Popular, like many of the other pulp houses, invented house names. Famous phantom authors, who didn’t exist, but who appeared regularly in our magazines. Any good writer who knew the genre of the magazine could write the story that went with the house name. The stories had to be good stories if a Popular Publications house name was used. However, many of the second or third level pulp houses just used house pseudonyms as a convenience. When any author had two stories in the same issue, one story went out under a favorite house name. Or when an editor needed something written fast to fill an emergency gap in an issue, many writers turned out a story that would serve, but it wasn’t a work he’d want associated with his own name. So the editor would roll out one of the house names of the magazine. Or the writer would roll out one of his favorite pseudonyms.

(Note:
A list of pseudonyms of Hugh B. Cave follows this introductory interview.)

After pondering the problems of keeping track of pen names, I asked Hugh when he started keeping records. Did he have a system for sending stories out, and if rejected, sending them along to the next appropriate magazine?

I have tried to keep very accurate records, but I have some blank spots, too. It is a hard job for a beginning professional writer. Before Lurton “Count” Blassingame became my agent in the summer of 1931, I used to send stories out to the highest-paying pulps first. If they were rejected, I went on down the line until they sold. Of course, once I sold to a good market I tried to keep that market well supplied. Then I followed the same procedure in the late 1940s for the slicks, where in the beginning I didn’t use an agent. So my record keeping grew out of my method of getting my early stories placed.

I asked Hugh to go back to his early experiences as a writer. By July of 1929, the same year Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
was serialized in
Black Mask
, he made his first professional pulp sale, “Island Ordeal,” to
Brief Stories.
He followed that up the next month with “The Pool of Death” also in
Brief Stories.

By 1930 and 1931 he was selling stories all over the place in many diverse markets. He favored
Short Stories,
a general pulp, just a tier below
Argosy
and
All Story.
(I should point out, however, Hugh did sell to
Argosy
as early as 1931 with “Steal a Dog’s Bone,” and made nine more appearances in the great magazine through 1950.) Even at this early stage in his career, the titles of many of these stories conjure visions of horror and fantasy: “The Pool of Death” (1929) and “Condemned to a Living Tomb” (1930) in
Brief Stories
; “The Corpse on the Grating” and “The Murder Machine” (both 1930) in
Astounding Stories.
And two tales in
Ghost Stories
in 1931, “The Strange Case of No. 7” and “The Affair of the Clutching Hand,” that were collected forty-six years later in Hugh’s award-winning horror/ fantasy book
Murgunstrumm and Others.

Within two years of turning professional, Hugh B. Cave had dozens of stories published, and in tough markets. How does he explain such an early and immediate success as a professional writer? Did he study the markets, analyze what editors were buying, or use successful short stories as practice models—as so many of the great early pulp writers report they did?

I have to tell you and the readers more about myself and my early experiences to explain the influences that I believe made me an early and successful writer. When I was not quite five years old my adventurous parents decided to move to America, where they knew no one. The ship landed in Boston. I grew up around Boston in Cambridge, Winchester, Brighton, Brookline (I went to Brookline High School), Maiden, and Back Bay.

As a boy, I sang in Boston’s Emmanuel Church choir for several years. For two weeks every summer we choir kids went to a church camp on Cape Cod. The choirmaster, Mr. Albert Snow, who also played the organ for the Boston Symphony, taught me a love for music. At camp, he also read to us every evening around a camp fire—creepy stories by Poe, Bierce, Conan Doyle, etc. Is it any wonder I wrote for
Weird Tales
,
Strange Tales
,
Terror Tales
, and all the others, when I began writing for the pulps? Or that I wrote stories such “The Silent Horror” for
The Saturday Evening Post,
and similar tales for other slicks? Or that I wrote detective-mystery tales for
Black Mask
and other publications?

When I was in grammar school, living in Brighton, we kids used to walk a couple of miles to go to the movies every Saturday afternoon at a theater, which, if I remember right, was called the Billy Woods. (Also, if I remember right, admission was a dime!) My favorite movies featured Tom Mix and William S. Hart. I read Owen Wister and other fine Western writers also. Is it any wonder I wrote for Western pulp magazines?

In Brookline, where I graduated from high school at age sixteen (just a month short of seventeen) we lived within walking distance of the public library. My brother Geoff and I spent many hours in that library. (My brother Tom was then away at sea, all over the world as a radio operator on ships.) Also, the various homes I grew up in were always filled with books. My mother knew Kipling.

I read Kipling and Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugh Walpole (I was named after him), Stevenson, Dickens, Maugham, London, Dumas, Conrad, Wells, Scott, and many other fine writers. You learn to write by reading, not by taking courses in “Creative Writing.” If my memory serves me well, a fellow war correspondent, J. C. Furnas, once wrote an article to that effect that was published in
Atlantic Monthly.

At Brookline High I won a scholarship to Boston University, but had to go to work, instead, because my father was nearly killed by a runaway street car. A vanity-publishing house in Boston gave me a job designing book jackets and editing manuscripts. That lasted about a year. Then I began selling to the pulps and turned to writing full time, attending college evenings.

I later went from the pulps to the slicks to books—war books first, as a correspondent in World War II, then a book on Haiti, where I lived for several winters, and one on Jamaica, where I bought a run-down coffee plantation in the Blue Mountains and restored it over the years to produce prize-winning coffee. Then I moved on to mainstream novels, paperback novels, and collections of short stories. All this time I maintained a home base in the States, first in Rhode Island, then in Florida to be closer to the islands.

Did Hugh have to do much rewriting for editors to get his early stories placed?

No, I didn’t do much rewriting, but I never hesitated to do so if an editor suggested changes in a story and I agreed with him. The idea was to get those stories out and move them from the highest paying markets to the lower until they sold.

“The Reader Has to Feel Something”

Things changed for Hugh in 1931 when he acquired an agent to do “the story moving” and “accounting” for him. In an August 1931 letter, Hugh wrote to his good friend and fellow writer, Carl Jacobi:

I’m letting one of NY’s best agents handle my stuff (some of it) just now, and the son of a gun sold a dud, which had been out 17 times, to
American Boy
(slick paper) for three cents per.

In correspondence with me, Hugh explained how he acquired his new literary agent to help sell his stories and to aid in the massive job of keeping records for so prolific an author as himself.

Rogers Terrill, an important editor at Popular Publications, told me I ought to have an agent, and he recommended Lurton Blassingame. Everyone in the business knew Lurton as “Count.”

I was lucky to interview Lurton Blassingame in 1974. At that time, Robert Heinlein was his major client. His brother, Wyatt, was also a writer, mainly for the horror pulps. The “Count” and I talked about the pulp publishing days. I remember that he was impeccably dressed and very cordial. He knew a lot about the history of Harry Steeger’s Popular Publications, the publishing house I was most interested in because I was gathering material about
Black Mask
and
Dime Detective
and Popular’s shudder pulps at the time.