Pulpster Hugh B. Cave (1910-2004)  was born on this date, July 11. Cave wrote for a variety of pulps in the 1930s, including Black Mask and Weird Tales. He was prolific enough that he used multiple pen names, the most famous being Justin Case. He was a war correspondent during WWII. After the war he bought a coffee plantation in Jamaica. During this period his writing shifted from the pulps, which were fast on their way out, to writing for the slicks, primarily what would be called “women’s fiction” today and was considered romance at the time.

Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa published some of Cave’s stories from the horror and fantasy in Murgunstrumm and Others in the 1970’s. This opened the door to him returning to weird fiction. Cave was experiencing something of a renaissance in the early 2000’s, with collections of his pulp stories from Fedogan and Bremer and Ash-Tree Press, among others, in addition to a steady output of novels. He passed away shortly after his autobiography, Cave of a Thousand Tales, was published.

For his birthday, I read “The Black Gargoyle”. It was the cover story for the March 1934 issue of Weird Tales.   It is available in the collection of the same name.

Set on Borneo, the unnamed narrator and his companion, Martin Gow, are traveling upriver to join a museum expedition. They stop to rest at an outpost run by a man named Gomez. Gomez is an evil man, the very stereotype of the white oppressor.

Gomez has given them a hut in which there are several skulls and a shrunken head on a shelf above the beds. Also staying in another hut are a man and his wife. The man, Trellegen, is a minor government official who has been sent up the river to get acquainted with the island; he’s relatively new to his post. He’s also a coward who is easily frightened, although he does have reason to be scared.

His wife is a beautiful young woman. Gomez obviously intends to claim her for himself.

Gomez is hated and feared by all the natives. He brags about how he keeps them in their place by creating an atmosphere of terror through abuse and murder, including the murder of the local shaman a month previous.

The narrator and Gow soon find themselves caught up in the intrigue. It begins when they hear something crawling down the wall of their hut and out the door. The jungle is full of creepy-crawly critters, such as centipedes. It also has other things…

“The Black Gargoyle” was a bit predictable, although there is a nice, nasty surprise about what is actually going on. I’ll be reading more of Cave’s work.