Long Live the Dead : Tales from Black Mask [Paperback]

Hugh B. Cave (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Crippen & Landru Pub; 1 edition (November 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885941501
• ISBN-13: 978-1885941503
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,458,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hugh Cave Appreciation: Words From This Book's Editor, March 30, 2001

By 

Keith Alan Deutsch (Woodbridge, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Long Live the Dead : Tales from Black Mask (Paperback)

As the book's editor, and the man who interviewed Hugh B. Cave for the book, I am taking the unusual step of commenting on LONG LIVE THE DEAD with important information not presented elsewhere on the Amazon.com pages.

I want fans of Hugh B. Cave to know that this book contains a substantial introduction to the total career of Mr. Cave written in honor of his 90th birthday.

This collection of all of Mr. Cave's Black Mask tales also includes a very comprehensive interview with Hugh Cave that covers in more detail than any other work, Mr. Cave's views on the process of writing good stories in any genre.

I am proud to have worked closely with Mr. Cave to bring readers as much new information as possible about him, about his career, and about his approach to writing.

Although this is a wonderful collection of Black Mask detective tales, fans of all genres will find new information about this master of 20th Century Popular Literature in this book. And fans of Black Mask will discover new information about the history of that great magazine.

Those interested in Black Mask and the history of pulp fiction are invited to explore and to contribute to our web site: blackmaskmagazine.com.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Real "Pulp" Fiction from one of the Greats, January 5, 2005

By 

James Clar (upstate NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask (Hardcover)

Who goes down those Mean Streets? Hugh B. Cave, that's who! Cave, the author of thirty-seven books and over eleven hundred stories, sold eight hundred of those tales to pulp publications of every genre imaginable from "weird menace" and horror to romance and western. It is little wonder that Cave also found an outlet for his writing in the most famous pulp magazine of them all, the hardboiled Black Mask. That legendary publication, the early home of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner, to name just a few of the giants of the genre who got their start in its pages, published ten tales by Cave between 1934 and 1941. LONG LIVE THE DEAD collects for the first time all of Cave's Black Mask tales.

Given the inherent constraints of so-called "formula fiction," Cave's inventiveness and ingenuity as evidenced in these stories is simply astonishing. The author credits his versatility as a writer to his varied interests and wide reading as a youth. Cave draws on that eclectic background in these tales as he employs both a diversity of settings and characters as well as a wide range of narrative techniques. "Lost and Found," for example, is set in the Florida Keys and that milieu alone provides a radical departure from more standard hardboiled fare. Perhaps the most interesting story in the collection is "The Missing Mr. Lee." Here, the various suspects and witnesses in a murder investigation take turns narrating events from their own perspective. The result of this experiment is both highly creative and entertaining. In fact, this is downright innovative stuff for a lowly pulp narrative!

The folks at Crippen and Landru have gone all out with LONG LIVE THE DEAD. Cave provides a general introduction as well as a brief preface to each story in the collection. Pulp historians and aficionados will be thrilled by the complete and annotated bibliography of Cave's published work that is also included in this handsome volume. The extensive interview with the author conducted by Keith Alan Deutsch (the current proprietor and conservator of Black Mask) is the proverbial icing on the cake. All in all, LONG LIVE THE DEAD should be a huge hit both with devoted pulp fiction enthusiasts as well as with mystery readers interested in exploring the roots of the genre. Hugh B. Cave died on June 27, 2004 at the age of 93. (An expanded version of this review was first published in JUDAS: HARDBOILED Ezine, Vol. 1, No.1).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best Hugh B. Cave Anthology, August 18, 2009

By 

Baron Von Cool - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Long Live the Dead : Tales from Black Mask (Paperback)

I believe Hugh B. Cave was one of the all-time greatest of the pulp writers, but Long Live The Dead, which reprints all of his mystery/detective tales from Black Mask magazine, was not his best work. The stories are okay but nothing special, certainly nothing memorable. Worse, whoever edited this book needs to have their head examined! There are a ton of embarrassing typos and formatting errors riddled throughout the entire book. Perhaps these are holdovers from the original pulps that nobody bothered to correct, but I find their inclusion rather unforgivable, particularly in what is supposed to be a book meant to honor and celebrate the author on his 90th birthday.

Instead of Long Live The Dead, I would recommend you buy these Hugh B. Cave reprint anthologies (in order of awesomeness): Murgunstrumm & Others, Death Stalks the Night and The Door Below.