Long Live the Dead — Hugh B. Cave

-- A LEGENDARY MAGAZINE

Hugh B. Cave was one of the most popular and prolific writers during the Golden Age of the Pulp Magazines between the late 1920's and the early 1940's. His name on the cover of Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Weird Tales, Short Stories, Clues, Argosy, Horror Story, Astounding, and countless other all-fiction magazines guaranteed a story with vivid characters and crackling pace.

The greatest of all detective pulps, Black Mask Magazine, created the hardboiled private-eye story with tales by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Carroll John Daly, and others. Hugh Cave joined that select group in 1934 when the editor Captain Joseph T. Shaw published his "Too Many Women," a tough story of a corpse on the waterfront and a sleazy photographer. Cave followed with stories about a dog who helps a cop, a magician who is accused of murder, a P. I. hired to find a girl on the Florida Keys, and an assortment of other flavorful characters. Cave rang many changes on the Black Mask style, from the male-female banter of "Smoke in Your Eyes," to "The Missing Mr. Lee" which is related consecutively by 5 or 6 different characters, to the violent gangland setting of "Stranger in Town."

Published in honor of Hugh B. Cave's 90th birthday, Long Live the Dead takes the reader back to the great age of the private-eye story. The book includes new prefaces to each story by the author, an introduction by Keith Allan Deutsch, proprietor of Black Mask Magazine, and a checklist of Cave's mystery writing.