Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask - Hardcover

Cave, Hugh B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1885941498 ISBN 13: 9781885941497

Publisher: Crippen & Landru Pub, 2000

Synopsis

A LEGENDARY AUTHOR — — 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.

About this title

Reviews

When crime fiction aficionados refer to "pulp fiction," the publication they usually have in mind is Black Mask, which was a regular home to Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Among the other Black Mask regulars was Hugh Cave, who made his first appearance in the magazine in 1934. Amazingly, he's still going strong at 90 after 37 books. The 10 stories collected here were all published in Black Mask between 1934 and 1941. Among the highlights are "Too Many Women," in which an unscrupulous photographer and a waterfront corpse spell trouble, and "The Missing Mr. Lee," a Rashomon-like tale in which a half dozen characters offer their unique versions of the truth. In the title story, a retired, reclusive magician is framed for murder and must use all his Houdini-like skills to avoid becoming the next victim. These are uniformly entertaining tales that take readers back to a time when dames, runts, thugs, and hard cases ruled the print world. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Crippen & Landru Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1885941498
• ISBN 13: 9781885941497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240