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The Murder Machine
"It was dusk, on the evening of December 7, 1906, when I first encountered Sir John Harmon. At the moment of his entrance, I was standing over the table in my study, a lighted match in my cupped hands and a pipe between my teeth. The pipe was never lit." So begins this short story by Hugh B Cave where an uncanny device takes possession of the minds of "law abiding citizens" and molds them into murdering tools. A rather mad scientist combines hypnotic waves with radio waves, and thus The Murder Machine.
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First published July 9, 2010
About the author
Hugh B. Cave
249 books34 followersHugh Barnett Cave was a prolific writer of pulp fiction who also excelled in other genres.
Sources differ as to when Cave sold his first story: some say it was while he still attended Brookline High School, others cite "Island Ordeal", written at age 19 in 1929 while still working for the vanity press.
In his early career he contributed to such pulp magazines as Astounding, Black Mask, and Weird Tales. By his own estimate, in the 1930s alone, he published roughly 800 short stories in nearly 100 periodicals under a number of pseudonyms. Of particular interest during this time was his series featuring an independent gentleman of courageous action and questionable morals called simply The Eel. These adventures appeared in the late 1930s and early 40s under the pen name Justin Case. Cave was also one of the most successful contributors to the weird menace or "shudder pulps" of the 1930s.
In 1943, drawing on his experience as a war reporter, he authored one of his most highly regarded novels, Long Were the Nights, telling of the first PT boats at Guadalcanal. He also wrote a number of other books on the war in the Pacific during this period.
During his post-war sojourn in Haiti, he became so familiar with the religion of Voodoo that he published Haiti: High Road to Adventure, a nonfiction work critically acclaimed as the "best report on voodoo in English." His Caribbean experiences led to his best-selling Voodoo-themed novel, The Cross On The Drum (1959), an interracial story in which a white Christian missionary falls in love with a black Voodoo priest's sister.
During this midpoint in his career Cave advanced his writing to the "slick" magazines, including Collier's, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post. It was in this latter publication, in 1959, that "The Mission," his most popular short story, appeared—subsequently issued in hardcover by Doubleday, reprinted in textbooks, and translated into a number of languages.
But his career took a dip in the early 1970s. According to The Guardian, with the golden era of pulp fiction now in the past, Cave's "only regular market was writing romance for women's magazines." He was rediscovered, however, by Karl Edward Wagner, who published Murgunstrumm and Others, a horror story collection that won Cave the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Other collections followed and Cave also published new horror fiction.
His later career included the publication in the late 1970s and early 1980s of four successful fantasy novels: Legion of the Dead (1979), The Nebulon Horror (1980), The Evil (1981), and Shades of Evil (1982). Two other notable late works are Lucifer's Eye (1991) and The Mountains of Madness (2004). Moreover, Cave took naturally to the Internet, championing the e-book to such an extent that electronic versions of his stories can readily be purchased online.
Over his entire career he wrote more than 1,000 short stories in nearly all genres (though he is best remembered for his horror and crime pieces), approximately forty novels, and a notable body of nonfiction. He received the Phoenix Award as well as lifetime achievement awards from the International Horror Guild, the Horror Writers Association, and the World Fantasy Convention. (From Wikipedia.)
Used the pseudonyms John Starr and Justin Case
Sources differ as to when Cave sold his first story: some say it was while he still attended Brookline High School, others cite "Island Ordeal", written at age 19 in 1929 while still working for the vanity press.
In his early career he contributed to such pulp magazines as Astounding, Black Mask, and Weird Tales. By his own estimate, in the 1930s alone, he published roughly 800 short stories in nearly 100 periodicals under a number of pseudonyms. Of particular interest during this time was his series featuring an independent gentleman of courageous action and questionable morals called simply The Eel. These adventures appeared in the late 1930s and early 40s under the pen name Justin Case. Cave was also one of the most successful contributors to the weird menace or "shudder pulps" of the 1930s.
In 1943, drawing on his experience as a war reporter, he authored one of his most highly regarded novels, Long Were the Nights, telling of the first PT boats at Guadalcanal. He also wrote a number of other books on the war in the Pacific during this period.
During his post-war sojourn in Haiti, he became so familiar with the religion of Voodoo that he published Haiti: High Road to Adventure, a nonfiction work critically acclaimed as the "best report on voodoo in English." His Caribbean experiences led to his best-selling Voodoo-themed novel, The Cross On The Drum (1959), an interracial story in which a white Christian missionary falls in love with a black Voodoo priest's sister.
During this midpoint in his career Cave advanced his writing to the "slick" magazines, including Collier's, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post. It was in this latter publication, in 1959, that "The Mission," his most popular short story, appeared—subsequently issued in hardcover by Doubleday, reprinted in textbooks, and translated into a number of languages.
But his career took a dip in the early 1970s. According to The Guardian, with the golden era of pulp fiction now in the past, Cave's "only regular market was writing romance for women's magazines." He was rediscovered, however, by Karl Edward Wagner, who published Murgunstrumm and Others, a horror story collection that won Cave the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Other collections followed and Cave also published new horror fiction.
His later career included the publication in the late 1970s and early 1980s of four successful fantasy novels: Legion of the Dead (1979), The Nebulon Horror (1980), The Evil (1981), and Shades of Evil (1982). Two other notable late works are Lucifer's Eye (1991) and The Mountains of Madness (2004). Moreover, Cave took naturally to the Internet, championing the e-book to such an extent that electronic versions of his stories can readily be purchased online.
Over his entire career he wrote more than 1,000 short stories in nearly all genres (though he is best remembered for his horror and crime pieces), approximately forty novels, and a notable body of nonfiction. He received the Phoenix Award as well as lifetime achievement awards from the International Horror Guild, the Horror Writers Association, and the World Fantasy Convention. (From Wikipedia.)
Used the pseudonyms John Starr and Justin Case
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 27, 2020
Despite the hundreds of Radium-Age scifi short stories and "novellettes" I have read over the years, I rarely have reviewed them separately, but sometimes it helps to leave behind a little reminder of what you thought about works in the shorter formats. Especially with older works or those who have passed into the public domain, stories get jumbled together and repackaged in a variety of anthologies, and it is hard to make recommendations to a reader based on the countless configurations of collected works out there.
Case in point, Hugh B. Cave is one of those authors who appears in a plethora of such anthologies, usually in horror. But his work is sometimes difficult to categorize. "The Murder Machine" is one of those that, to call it simply scifi, is misleading. It is more along the lines of a Sherlockian mystery featuring a scientific supervillain, one of several Edwardian examples of this style that became popular in Radium-Age pulps, where the main character is a Watson-like bachelor physician who teams up with Scotland Yard to solve a fantastic crime committed by a mad scientist. I use the term "mystery" loosely because there is no attempt at concealing the identity of the "whodunit." You know who the bad guy is right from the start, so the main question is how he done it. In this case, this question is answered in a way that may seem hokey to most passive genre fans, but to hard core consumers of scifi and horror, this will feel like home, and will remind folks that this is the kind of literature that crimefighting superhero comics were born from.
"The Murder Machine" is a classic example of a popular subgenre of scifi from the early 1900s, namely of mind control. It harkens to the popular writings of English masters like Richard Marsh who have been getting "rediscovered" lately. It is comfort food for lovers of classic literature, horror, mystery, or scifi.
But otherwise, there is nothing particularly outstanding about the writing style, the characters, or the narrative. This is just a short piece of pulp that, should you run across it in one of your anthologies, you can feel comfortable investing the time to read.
Case in point, Hugh B. Cave is one of those authors who appears in a plethora of such anthologies, usually in horror. But his work is sometimes difficult to categorize. "The Murder Machine" is one of those that, to call it simply scifi, is misleading. It is more along the lines of a Sherlockian mystery featuring a scientific supervillain, one of several Edwardian examples of this style that became popular in Radium-Age pulps, where the main character is a Watson-like bachelor physician who teams up with Scotland Yard to solve a fantastic crime committed by a mad scientist. I use the term "mystery" loosely because there is no attempt at concealing the identity of the "whodunit." You know who the bad guy is right from the start, so the main question is how he done it. In this case, this question is answered in a way that may seem hokey to most passive genre fans, but to hard core consumers of scifi and horror, this will feel like home, and will remind folks that this is the kind of literature that crimefighting superhero comics were born from.
"The Murder Machine" is a classic example of a popular subgenre of scifi from the early 1900s, namely of mind control. It harkens to the popular writings of English masters like Richard Marsh who have been getting "rediscovered" lately. It is comfort food for lovers of classic literature, horror, mystery, or scifi.
But otherwise, there is nothing particularly outstanding about the writing style, the characters, or the narrative. This is just a short piece of pulp that, should you run across it in one of your anthologies, you can feel comfortable investing the time to read.
January 7, 2011
I really enjoyed this sci-fi murder tale... imagine someone being able to control a man'a mind from a distance to the point that he could commit a murder without even being an inch away from the scene of the crime...
October 25, 2025
great scifi short story by a master
January 3, 2013
This short story by Hugh Cave is an intriguing read - having hints of Doyle and Poe in its style. It is equally interesting for its reflection of the scientific understandings of its period and invites the reader into a speculative incident of mystery at the hands of science and pseudo-science misapplied. At is core, it is a story of the power of creativity run amok.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews