“In high school, I had written fiction, and had two stories published in the Boston Globe Magazine, in their annual short story contest.  Both won Honorable Mention.  I had also written and sold a story to one of the sunday school magazines put out by the David C. Cook Company.  I had gotten out of high school at sixteen and I went looking for a job, because my father had been killed in a street car accident.  I had a scholarship to Boston University, but I couldn’t go except at night.  I had to work to earn some money, so I went to an employment place where there was a position open with Four Seas Publishing Company in Back Bay, Boston, where I was living at the time.  Four Seas was a vanity publishing company, run by one man, Edmund R. Brown, who liked me right away.  When he found out I could draw a little bit, he put me to work designing book jackets and proof-reading copy.

“Later, when writing for the pulps, I didn’t have much contact with editors, except on one very dramatic occasion.  Before I had an agent, I used to have a habit (when a story was rejected) of not rewriting it.  I would put the story on a shelf, and once in a while when I didn’t have an idea, I’d pick up one of these stories and work on it.  A story came back from one of the magazines, and I picked it up and rewrote it as a Tsiang House story for Short Stories, whose editor bought it.  Then, without thinking, I put the original manuscript back in the unsold pile.  A while later, I took the half a dozen stories in the pile and mailed them out to various magazines.  That story (the original of the one I had revised) sold to Top Notch.  Then, the stories came out, and both in the same month, so they were on the news stands at the same time.  They were basically the same story, except for a few changes to names of places and characters. 

“Well, the letters began to come in from the readers of the two magazines.  The editors had been in touch with each other, and I got two very strong letters telling me to get down there to answer some questions.  I was just a fresh-faced kid arriving in New York to face the firing squad.  I went to Top Notch first, and the editor, who was an older man, took a fatherly attitude toward me.  He thought that I was a young man with a great future, and he knew that I would not sacrifice my career by doing this on purpose.  Then he said we were going to have lunch with Roy de S. Horn at The Army and Navy Club, and that I might find Mr. Horn a little harder to convince.  We finally reached a settlement where I would answer every single fan letter that came in on this subject (there had been over a hundred).  I was not to write a form letter; I was to try to figure out what kind of person wrote each letter and answer that person in the manner in which he had written it, telling the truth.  For several weeks I did nothing but write those letters.  Many of those people remained fans of mine, and wrote letters to me and the editors on stories that were published later, even after I began selling to the slick magazines.

“The experience certainly taught me to be careful, and reminded me to make carbon copies of things.  I had written a long adventure story, a serial, and mailed it to Argosy, without making a carbon copy.  The editor at Argosy wrote back and said that if I would make certain changes in it, they would buy the story.  This would have meant a sale of about a thousand dollars, which was big money in those days.  The manuscript never got to me, it got lost in the mail.  To this day, I don’t remember that story.  Another thing that I learned to do was to keep a complete record of every story I wrote.  I used to keep notebooks listing the story with my original title, the date that I had finished it, the number of words, its history, when it was published, and the title.  There had been no room in my study for these notebooks and my pulp magazines.  I was writing for the slicks at the time, and had taken all of my pulp stuff, packed it in boxes and put it in the garden house.  One hot summer weekend while we were gone, the garden house and all of its contents burned to the ground. 

“As the Rhode Island representative for The American Fiction Guild, I wrote to H. P. Lovecraft initially about joining, and we exchanged several other letters as friends.  I made the mistake of citing the famous quote ‘No one but a blockhead writes, except for money.’  Lovecraft then wrote to someone else that I was ‘purely a Philistine, only in it for the money.’  At the time I was writing for over a dozen pulps, and getting paid at least two cents a word.  Poor Lovecraft was writing for mainly one market, and getting a half cent a word, paid upon publication.  I even suggested to Lovecraft other markets that he might write for, but he responded that he wrote only to please himself, and money didn’t interest him.  What I liked about Lovecraft was his imagination.  However, I thought that his flowery prose was a bit Victorian.  I didn’t want to imitate that in the slightest, it was not my idea of modern writing.  However, I read his stories, and always enjoyed them. 

“Carl Jacobi and I decided that we’d each pick a locale, and Borneo was the one that I picked.  I knew a little bit about the British Service out there because my father had been with the British Army.  The first Borneo story that I wrote was called “The Shadow of Tsiang”, and it was bought by Short Stories.  The readers liked it, so Short Stories asked me to do some more tales about this British outpost.  Then, during World War Two, I was nearly killed in Borneo.  By this time I had written four war books.  I was with the U. S. Navy and Australian troops, and we went ashore in the second wave.  At the top of the ridge there were Japanese “spider holes”, which were vertical shafts covered over, containing snipers with machine guns.  All of a sudden, an Aussie soldier grabbed me and we dove under an abandoned jeep as the bullets flew around us.  We remained there for forty-five minutes while the sniper shot the jeep to pieces, until someone finally killed him.  Before Borneo, I was in The Philippines, at Clark Field under an arrangement with an Army captain assigned to a group of correspondents.  His name was Robert Reeves, and he had written for Black Mask.  Bob and I were planning to accompany a bombing raid on Formosa, I with the flight leader and Bob with the wing man.  However, I was delayed because I had to accompany a sick colleague, first to a hospital ship off of the north coast of New Guinea, then to an Aussie camp from where we finally were able to hitch-hike back to Clark Field, several  days late for my appointment to go on the mission with Bob Reeves.  Some fellows that I knew at the bar finally told me that Bob had taken my place in the lead plane, and had been shot down during the mission. 

“From the time that I started selling to the pulps, I began subscribing to and reading everything in the slicks, such as Colliers, Liberty, and Red Book.  I would set time aside every so often, after writing every four or five pulp stories, to try and write a slick paper story.  I first began to sell to the  Canadian markets, and I kept sending stories to the big magazines.  Finally, I got a letter from Stuart Rose, one of the three top editors for The Saturday Evening Post.  He pointed out things that I did in my thinking and plotting which were a little too “pulpy”.  I was a fast learner, and though he made me revise it a couple of times, he bought my next story.  After that, he bought five or six stories a year for the next two or three years.  He started me at eight hundred dollars, and after every five stories, he would raise me.  By the time The Saturday Evening Post changed hands, I had sold him forty-four stories, and I had received thirty-five hundred dollars for the last one.  One of my stories in The Saturday Evening Post, ‘The Mission’ (March 14, 1959), featured a full-page portrait of the heroine, by painter Peter Stevens.  Later that year, The Post’s art department reported that ‘no other illustration has rivaled it for amount, duration and enthusiasm of reader reaction.’

“Whenever I sold a story to The Saturday Evening Post, I got a reversion of all rights except their right to reprint the story.  I could use the story anywhere else except in magazines in North America.  Many of those Post stories of mine were later published all over, in nearly thirty different countries.  If a story wasn’t accepted by the Post, I could always submit it to Country Gentleman, Cosmopolitan, American Magazine, and many others, all of these paying far more than any of the pulp magazines.  I wrote a lot for Boys’ Life magazine.  As a matter of fact, the Boys’ Life Book of Mystery Stories was a hardcover anthology of the best mystery stories in Boys’ Life, and three of the ten were mine.  I used to do short shorts for This Week magazine, which was published in Sunday newspapers all over America.  They used one short short story per issue, and paid me about a thousand dollars for a thousand words.

“When I was trying to break into the slicks, I had to do it on my own.  My agent felt that I was a big name in the pulps, and always would be.  He didn’t realize, and I did, that the pulps wouldn’t always be there.  I broke off with Lurton Blassingame after I had sold to a few of the slicks.  We remained close friends, but he no longer handled my copy.  I didn’t have an agent for the slicks; I sold all of those stories myself.  I didn’t get another agent until the last of the slicks began to die out. 

“Today I admire the small press tremendously.  It is a salvation for writers, because all of the big press seem to be part of some conglomerate.  Soon there will be one group of editors to decide who becomes famous and who does not.  When I was living in Jamaica, a letter was forwarded to me from David Drake, discussing Whispers magazine, and asking me to contribute a story to it.  I had a story (“Take Me For Instance”) which I had sold to Argosy in England, but it had never appeared  in the United States.  I sent it to them, Dave accepted it and asked for another one.  Stuart continued buying stories from me.  It was like being a kid again, writing for Weird Tales, although  I was in my mid-fifties at the time.  To this day, I think that Stuart Schiff is one of the finest editors in the business.  He knows a good story. 

“Robert M. Price wrote to me and sent me samples of his magazines.  In one of the stories that I wrote for Shudder Stories (“Brides of the Blood Fiend From Hell”), just for the heck of it I used Justin Case as  the hero.  Karl Edward Wagner picked up on this and wrote to the magazine, suggesting that there should be a Robert E. Howard story, this one written by Sam Walser (a Howard pseudonym).  He even suggested the title “Six Gun Hellcat From Black River”.  It was later written by Mark Cerrasini,  Charles Hoffman and me, and the plot had Justin Case and Sam Walser down in Mexico looking for Hugh B. Cave and Robert E. Howard, who had disappeared trying to track down Ambrose Bierce.  One summer, while my two sons were out of school, we actually spent several months driving through Mexico on the back roads.

In 1978, Hugh received the World Fantasy Award for his collection entitled Murgunstrum.  And, in 1991 he was presented with the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers of America.  Hugh and Peggy have accepted an invitation to be Special Guests at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention, which will be held in London, England during the Halloween weekend.

Hugh’s recent books are both entertaining and informative, and have enjoyed excellent reviews.   ‘Death Stalks The Night’ (Fedogan & Bremer, 1995), is a thrilling collection of Weird Menace stories from the pulp days.  ‘Magazines I Remember’ (Tattered Pages Press, 1994) is based on correspondence between Cave and fellow writer Carl Jacobi over the course of sixty years.  Finally, to learn more about the man and his career, the definitive work is ‘Pulp Man’s Odyssey’ by Audrey Parente (Starmont House, 1988).

The changes which Hugh B. Cave has witnessed during his lifetime are almost incomprehensible, from the end of colonial empire to the emergence of space travel.  Yet, he has endured and flourished as a writer, perfecting his craft, finding markets and forging new ground, enjoying an unbroken string of success for eight decades.  In spite of his many experiences, Hugh remains modest and unassuming and maintains an optimistic view about life.  When asked what makes a good writer, he replied “I don’t think that talent is so much an integral part of this, as is learning the craft.  A person is not born to write.  They learn to write and want to write by first reading.  I’m just going to keep writing, trying to make each story better than the last one.”