The Independent has a nice obit of Hugh B. Cave, who died
this week:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=536546
| Cave was also moving into the hard-boiled detective field.
He was the
| last living author to get an acceptance from the legendary
"Cap" Shaw -
| Captain Joseph T. Shaw, editor of the ground-breaking Black
Mask
| magazine - who, by promoting writers such as Dashiell
Hammett and
| Carroll John Daly, virtually created the hard-boiled genre.
Cave's own
| breakthrough story, "Too Many Women", was, for a
22-year-old, a
| startlingly tough and mature piece of writing,
stylistically more
| indebted to another great Black Mask writer, a favourite of
Cave's,
| Frederick Nebel.
The obit was written by Jack Adrian, who edited the
collection HARDBOILED with Bill Pronzini. I like this
anecdote:
| In 1943 the Dime Detective editor Ken White was offered a
cover by one
| of his regular artists which featured a grim-faced villain
about to
| shovel a baker's peel with a body on it into a fiery oven.
Could Cave
| come up with a 30,000-word thriller to explain,
reasonably
| satisfactorily, what on earth was going on? Two days and
two sleepless
| nights later Cave turned in a punchy tale he called,
mindful of White's
| love of punning, even absurd, titles, "This is the Way We
Bake Our Dead".
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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