A pulp fiction writer, Cave specialized in horror stories and giving the publishers what they wanted: an undressed heroine, and quickly. “It meant you could throw in lines like ‘she passionately pressed her ravishing, generously endowed body against me’,” he once said, “and then you could spend some time describing her ‘gauzy fripperies’.”
He chose the horror genre as a way to cope with his father’s serious injuries in a streetcar accident. A fast writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym “Justin Case”, Cave churned out more than 1,000 stories for pulp fiction magazines in the 1930s and ’40s, starting at age 15, and in more serious magazines in the ’50s and ’60s. He also wrote more than 50 books, some of which are still awaiting publication. Cave died June 27 in Florida from complications of diabetes. He was 93.