22662: (Chamberlain) Cave obit in today's Guardian (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(The Guardian, UK, 10  July 04)



Obituary -- Hugh B Cave

Author of horror, crime, fantasy and adventure from pulp fiction's golden
era

By John Williams



Hugh B Cave, who has died aged 93, wrote more than 1,000 short stories,
about 40 novels, and a considerable amount of non-fiction. His writing
spanned every genre, but it is for his horror and crime fiction that he is
best remembered.

Cave was born in Chester. His parents had met in South Africa where his
mother was a Boer war nurse and his father an army paymaster. Following the
outbreak of the first world war, the family moved to Boston in the US. Just
after Cave had left high school, his father was badly injured in an
accident so Cave had to abandon hopes of university. He ended up working
for a vanity press, where he began writing his own stories and poems and
sold his first story, Island Ordeal, in 1929, aged 19.

He quickly followed it up in pulps like Astounding Stories, Action Stories
and Short Stories. Aged 20, he was able to give up the only job he would
ever have and, during the next decade, he estimated that he wrote somewhere
in the region of 800 stories for about 100 magazines. This was at the time
that every drugstore news-stand was crammed with crime, horror, romance and
science fiction magazines. Any writer who could deliver 5,000 words of
tropical adventure by the day after tomorrow, might even make a living - no
small achievement during the depression. Cave found that he needed to sell
that one 5,000-word story a week to make $50.

"There was no TV then," he recalled to pulp historian Tim Dill, "and pulp
tales took the reader to all sorts of exotic, far-off places. Or to the old
west. Or to other planets. Or to worlds of the weird and fantastic. I would
buy a magazine, read it, [and] write something of the same sort."

Gradually, his work caught on. He was one of the few writers to appear both
in the great hardboiled pulp, Black Mask, where Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler began, and in the classic horror of Weird Tales. Less
revered, but his favourite, were his "Justin Case" stories for the "spicy
pulps", where in each story the heroine inadvertently lost her clothes.

With the second world war, Cave travelled widely around the Pacific and
south-east Asia, as a reporter. This led to several successful non-fiction
books and also reinvigorated his fiction. Cave had written hundreds of
stories set in far-off lands but had hitherto never visited them. Now he
was able to write authoritatively set south-sea adventures and to sell them
to the "slicks"- magazines like Collier's and Cosmopolitan that paid far
better than pulps.

In the early 1950s, Cave moved to Haiti where he became fascinated by
Voodoo, and then to Jamaica where he took over a derelict coffee plantation
that he turned into a great success. In the early 1970s, his plantation was
reclaimed by the Jamaican government and he returned to the US.

This was the low point of his writing career: the pulps had gone and his
only regular market was writing romance for women's magazines. But
rediscovery was at hand. Karl Edward Wagner, a classic horror buff noticed
Cave's byline in Woman's Own. The pair met, and Wagner published
Murgunstrumm And Others, a collection of Cave's horror stories. It won the
1978 World Fantasy Award. Further horror and crime collections of his pulp
fiction followed. Then in his 60s, a rejuvenated Cave produced a stream of
fiction, mostly in the horror genre and frequently using a Haitian voodoo
motif.

Cave was married twice, the second time to the great love of his life
Peggie, who died in 2001. A great raconteur, he was still happy to prop up
the bar at a convention until well into his 90s. He took instinctively to
the internet, and became a champion of the e-book, so it is now possible to
purchase as electronic downloads the same stories that once came printed on
the grey paper of the pulps.


Bob Corbett writes:
Hugh Cave and I met in 1984, after I read his guide, Haiti: High Road To
Adventure, and until recently we carried on a vibrant correspondence. We
worked together on a bibliography of his writings on Haiti for a couple of
years. When I could not locate a copy of the novel The Drums Of Revolt he
sent me his only extra copy. I treasure that book more than any other I
own.

Haitian Voodoo religion figured in many of Cave's Haitian novels and
stories, but unlike many foreign writers, he wrote with a knowledge of
Voodoo as a religion, and with respect for it. In The Cross On The Drum
(1959), an American Protestant missionary meets a Haitian houngan (Voodoo
priest) and they work hard at understanding each other's religion. The
white missionary even falls in love with the houngan's black sister - this
was heady stuff for 1959 pop American fiction. It was his best-selling
Haitian work, selected both for Doubleday Dollar Book Club and the Literary
Guild Bonus Book for 1959.

Hugh visited all the places he talks about in High Road To Adventure. He
knew many people there and was a good friend of Sister Joan Margaret, head
of Ecole St Vincent, an episcopal hospital/school for disabled children.
She was the model for the doctor in his story, Black Stockings, while a
pupil at the school was the model for the little girl in The Mission, the
short story of which he was most proud.


· Hugh Barnett Cave, writer, born July 11 1910; died June 27 2004