Retro Review: "Gambler's Asteroid" by Manly Wade Wellman

There are no space walrusses in "Gambler's Asteroid" either, though there are frog aliens.

"Gambler's Asteroid" is a space opera short story by Manly Wade Wellman, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

The titular gambler's asteroid is 624 Hektor (spelled "Hector" in this story), which in this story's version of the pulp science fiction shared solar system has been encased in a bubble of glassite and had its spin sped up by atomic engines to create artificial gravity (Hector is too small to have much in the way of natural gravity) on the inside of the glassite bubble. So all of the characters in this story are walking around on a glass floor with the stars below them. An enterprising Venusian then turned Hector into a sort of interplanetary Las Vegas or rather Atlantic City, considering that the Las Vegas we know today is largely a postwar phenomenon.

Our protagonist is Patch Merrick, a not very successful gambler, who has just bet his last value-units on a card game named Indemnity. The game is fictional, but Wellman explains how it works in a quick paragraph. Not that it matters much, because Merrick loses in the second round anyway.

Wellman now gives us some backstory about Merrick and his tentacled and telepathic Martian pal Zaarrgon. Turns out that Merrick and Zaarrgon are fugitives on the run. Zaarrgon is another of those social justice warriors that certain quarters still claim did not exist in golden age science fiction. He stole water to help his fellow Martians who were dying of thirst and thus attracted the attention of the Martio-Terrestrial League. I can't help but wonder whether this organisation is a rebrand of Leigh Brackett's Terran Exploitation Company. "Hey, we're still an evil bloodsucking company, but at least out new name is a little less blatant about it."

Zaarrgon ended up in prison, facing execution, and Merrick, who refers to himself as "guilty of sentimentality", broke him out. As a result, Merrick lost his promising career and his fiancée Morgana Conti, daughter of the wealthy Coburn Conti, and was forced to flee with Zaarrgon to the lawless asteroid belt. They stopped on Hector, hoping to win enough money – pardon, value-units – to buy supplies for their space cruiser and continue their escape. However, Martians are banned from gambling on Hector due to being telepathic and Merrick turns out to be really crap at gambling, so they're soon out of money and supplies.

The game that Merrick was playing normally ends with all players, including those who dropped out, comparing their totals. The highest total wins. Merrick had good cards. However, he and Zaarrgon are broke and the stakes are too high for them, so Merrick wagers their space cruiser instead. There is obviously no way this can go wrong.

However this time, Merrick gets lucky and beats not just a fellow human player named Mr. Alabaster, but also the house. Now he and Zaarrgon have more than enough to resupply their ship.

Mr. Alabaster, on the other hand, is not happy at all, because he was on Hector to do a job and the money he just gambled away was expense money. Turns out he is a bounter hunter, albeit a very inept one, who is supposed to hunt down Merrick and Zaarrgon on behalf of Morgana Conti and her father. Zaarrgon is still scheduled for execution. As for Merrick, his fate will be worse, at least according to Alabaster, because Morgana Conti still wants to marry him. As for Alabaster, he wound up with the bounty hunting job, because he's a friend of the Conti family and Morgana hired him. However, she did not consider supplying Alabaster with photos of Merrick and Zaarrgon, which seems like an odd oversight.

Zaarrgon gives the luckless Alabaster his money back and tells him that the fugitives are headed for the moons of Jupiter to throw him off their scent. Not that it helps much, because Zaarrgon and Merrick are arrested anyway by casino security guards who overheard their conversation with Alabaster.

And so Zaarrgon and Merrick end up in prison, while the casino security chief, a froglike Venusian named Lirog, immediately calls Morgana Conti and asks if the prisoners are the fugitives she seeks. Morgana confirms this, doubles the reward and declares that she will pick up the prisoners herself. Alabaster shows up again as well to gloat, because Morgana will pay him a handsome reward as well.

While Merrick and Alabaster are arguing, Zaarrgon uses one of his tentacles to steal a guard's handy rust raygun and uses it to reduce the lock of their cell to rust. Merrick knocks out a guard and the two fugitives are on the run once more.

On their way back to their space cruiser, they steal some of the atomic fuel for the engines which keep Hector spinning. There is some brief technobabble that Hector was once the centre of a planet that broke apart to form the asteroid belt, which is why powerful atomic fuel can be found there. Fuel powerful enough to take Zaarrgon's and Merrick's space cruiser beyond the solar system, though what they plan to do there is anybody's guess.

They reach the docking bay of their cruiser, Merrick knocks out two more guards and Zaarrgon, who's clearly the brains of this outfit, uses the rust ray he borrowed to weaken the frames of the glassite sheets and blow a hole into the bubble that envelops Hector, which will both allow the space cruiser to escape and keep everybody on the asteroid so busy with repairing the breach that they won't have time to follow the fugitives.

The plan works, too. Merrick and Zaarrgon escape and head for another asteroid to purchase supplies, since luckily no one thought to relieve them of their winnings before throwing them into prison.

However, as Merrick and Zaarrgon make their escape aboard their space cruiser, they receive a call from none other than Morgana, who informs them that her plan worked.

When Merrick points out that her plan didn't work, because he and Zaarrgon escaped, Morgana reveals that she wanted them to escape and made sure they would. She sent Alabaster after them, because he is the stupidest man she knows and a compulsive gambler besides. Then she bribed the card dealer to make sure that Alabaster lost all his expense money to Merrick, allowing Morgana to secretly finance Merrick's escape.

However, the card dealer informed Ligon, the casino security chief, who then decided to arrest Merrick and Zaargon to get the reward himself. Merrick once more tries to reassert his independence by telling Morgana that he and Zaargon broke out on their own.

"That's what you think", Morgana says and reveals that she paid Alabaster to smuggle the rust gun into the prison, allowing Merrick and Zaargon to escape. Merrick is dumbfounded and Morgana tells him that he can't come home now anyway, because he's still a wanted man and because there are still many things that Morgana has to fix. And besides, she knows that Merrick isn't ready to settle down just yet, but once he's had enough of adventure, he'll come back to her.

The story ends with Merrick moping and Zaarrgon babbling about asteroids and the creation of the asteroid belt and wondering why Merrick is moping. I take it back. Zaarrgon is not the brains of the outfit, he and Merrick are both idiots in their own way. Morgana, on the other hand, is awesome.

I have to admit, I only read this story, because I flipped forward through the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories after reading "Unsung Hero" by Ruth Washburn and came across this story – after two pages of "incredible but true Scientifacts". The interior art – showing an anthropomorphic frog and a man in a cage ogling an attractive woman – looked intriguing enough and besides, I like Manly Wade Wellman's writing, so I decided to read it. I'm glad that I did, because this is a fun space opera adventure that manages to pack a lot of plot into only six pages.

If I have one complaint about "Gambler's Asteroid" it's that it's too short. With the amount of plot and backstory there is, this could easily have been a novella, if not a novel. The glassite encased asteroid Hector is a fascinating setting, which I would have loved to explore more. I also would have loved to see Merrick break Zaarrgon out of prison and learn more about Merrick's relationship with Morgana and her father and just what his life and promising career were like, before he decided to free Zaarrgon. And of course, I would have loved to see more of Morgana than two brief videocalls, because Morgana is awesome.

Intergalactic gambling dens are a space opera staple these days, whether it's Canto Bight and Bespin of Star Wars fame (okay, we never actually see any gambling on Bespin, but you know it's going on somewhere, considering who runs the place), Stardust City in a recent Star Trek: Picard episode as well as a lots of other intergalactic gambling dens in pretty much every Star Trek series to date, the casino planet Carillon in the original Battlestar Galactica or The Scuttling Cockroach, where Mikhail and Anjali rescue Pietro Garibaldi and get themselves into trouble in my own Freedom's Horizon. However, Hector is the granddaddy of all of those intergalactic gambling dens. I'm not sure if this is the first intergalactic gambling den to ever feature in science fiction – most likely it's not. But it's definitely a very early example.

These days, Manly Wade Wellman is mainly remembered for his (very good) occult detective and folk horror stories – indeed, I reviewed one of them. But like most authors of the pulp era, Wellman was a man(ly) of any talents, who also wrote science fiction, mystery and crime fiction, comic books (a Spirit comic he wrote was nominated for the Retro Hugo this year) and historical non-fiction and who was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award over William Faulkner. However, Wellman's science fiction stories, particularly his space opera tales from the 1930s and 1940s, are less well known than his fantasy and horror stories. At least based on "Gambler's Asteroid", I think that's a pity.

Wellman's skills as a writer are clearly evident in this very short story. In a few lines and paragraphs, he manages to sketch a fascinating setting by sprinkling in details like "Venusian chirp-water music", a "Martian joy-lamp shedding stimulus rays overhead" or the popular Martian genre of "formalised comi-tragedy", all of which are attractions on offer on the glassite floors of Hector. Wellman also had a dry humour that sets his work apart from other pulpy space opera tales of the era.

Like too many of the stories I have reviewed here at Retro Reviews, "Gambler's Asteroid" has never been reprinted. I sincerely wonder why, because there is a lot to like about this fun space opera caper.

Retro Review: "Hoofs" by Manly Wade Wellman

"Hoofs" is a horror short story in the John Thunstone series by Manly Wade Wellman. It was first published in the March 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

John Thunstone is an occult detective created by Manly Wade Wellman who appeared in fifteen stories in Weird Tales between 1943 and 1951 as well as one further short story and two novels in the 1980s. Six of the John Thunstone stories appeared in 1944 alone, that's a third of the entire series excluding the novels, so the character and series were clearly popular. Steve J. Wright reviewed all six of the 1944 John Thunstone stories on his blog.

However, "Hoofs" does not begin with John Thunstone himself, but with his love interest, Sharon Countess Monteseco, a recurring character in the series. In spite of her Italian surname, the Countess is American, a woman named Sharon Hill who married an Italian Count who – so the first paragraph informs us – "was a rank bad man, and the world and the Countess were better off for his death".

But is the Count truly dead? A plump little man named Hengist who visits the Countess in her hotel suite claims that the Count is not in fact dead, but alive in another body. Hengist also insists that the Count loves his wife, which Sharon vehemently denies. Hengist also drops a name, Rowley Thorne. It's a name Sharon – and the reader – knows, because Thorne appeared in the very first John Thunstone story "The Third Cry to Legba" in the November 1943 issue of Weird Tales and was a recurring antagonist of Thunstone.

The Countess is not impressed, especially since Hengist not just drops Thorne's name, but also hits on her. And so she slaps him and throws him out. Hengist, on the other hand, is quite satisfied with the meeting. He calls Thorne and informs him that he carried out his instructions and that the Countess believes.

Sharon indeed believes, if only because being the girlfriend of an occult detective means experiencing a lot of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. And so Sharon has personally witnessed Rowley Thorne raise evil spirits, a description which certainly fits her late husband.

It quickly occurs to Sharon that John Thunstone might be able to help her. But unfortunately, they had a quarrel. Therefore, Sharon blows him off with the old "I have a headache" line, when he calls her to apologise. Barely a second later, she curses herself for not confiding in John Thunstone. But Sharon has bigger problems, for Rowley Thorne comes calling.

The description of Rowley Thorne that Wellman gives us – tall, hawklike, bald, gunmetal eyes – match a familiar occultist of our own world, namely Aleister Crowley, whose nonfiction work The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians is eligible for the 1944 Retro Hugos in the Best Related Work category, by the way. Even the names Rowley and Crowley are similar. Like Crowley, Thorne has a huge ego. "Some day," he informs the Countess, "the world will know me by a name of own choosing, a name of mastery." Thorne also assure Sharon that world domination is not what he's after, because that's a flat and outworn idea. I'm sure the world and its citizens will be very relieved.

In her first confrontation with Thorne, Sharon certainly holds her own. She tells Thorne that she's not afraid of him, for "Fear is folly, for people like you to feed on." She also accuses Thorne of lying about her husband. "If I lie, come and prove it," Thorne counters and so Sharon goes with him.

Thorne takes Sharon to an apartment where Hengist is already waiting. The apartment is empty except for a table on which there is a single object, a glowing glass horse. Thorne insists that the horse contains the spirit of the late Count. Sharon is understandably sceptical, but when she touches the glass, it feels warm. The glass horse also seems to nod in response to Thorne's questions. And when Thorne invites Sharon to ask the spirit a question that only the late Count could answer, the horse once more knows the answer.

Thorne's plan is to transfer the Count's spirit to Hengist and use the resurrected Count to subdue Sharon to get control of her money and also piss off John Thunstone in the bargain. Of course, Thorne assumes that Sharon will remain true to her marriage vows, even if the spirit of her husband – a husband she clearly despised – now resides in another body. It would certainly make an interesting court case to determine if a marriage is still valid, if one partner's spirit resides in a different body.

Meanwhile, Hengist – whose name is almost identical to "Hengst", the German word for "stallion" – isn't too keen on becoming a vessel for a dead Italian Count. And so he proposes to Sharon to throw away the potion he is supposed to drink and just fake that the transfer was successful. For certainly, a relationship with Hengist is preferable to having the Count back and being a slave to Rowley Thorne, he slimily proposes.

While Hengist is hitting on Sharon, Thorne is preparing his ritual, when he is interrupted by none other than John Thunstone himself. Thunstone had come to visit Sharon to make up with her, when he saw Hengist leaving. Recognising Hengist, Thunstone followed him to the apartment building, let himself in and hid behind the drapes, while Thorne explained his grand plan.

Once Hengist took Sharon away, Thunstone emerges to stop Thorne's ritual. In the resulting fight, Thorne grabs a swordcane and draws the blade – which is interesting, because a swordcane with a blade of silver inscribed with "Thus perish all your enemies" in Latin is John Thunstone's signature weapon. Alas, Thunstone did not bring his own swordcane, though he does manage to disarm Thorne. The glass horse also shatters during the fight.

"Do you realise what this means?" Thorne exclaims.

Thunstone calmly informs Thorne that the reincarnation of the late Count has been called off, because there is nowhere else for the trapped spirit to go. Thorne points out that he had already began the ritual and pointed the spirit at Hengist. Whereupon Thunstone replies that if Hengist isn't prepared, that's his misfortune and also Thorne's, because the results will be quite embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Hengist is still oozing slime all over Sharon who keeps insisting that there's someone or rather something outside the door. Hengist tries to draw her attention back to himself, when cloud of glowing vapour passes through the door, takes the shape of a horse and attacks Hengist. It's the spirit of the Count, looking for a new body, but finding no entrance, because Hengist hasn't taken the potion he was supposed to take. Sharon flees and stumbles right into the arms of John Thunstone who takes her home.

Thunstone and Sharon never discuss the incident directly, but the next day at lunch, Thunstone tells Sharon that the papers are reporting that a dead body was found in an empty apartment, seemingly trampled to death by horses, although there were no horses anywhere in the vicinity.

This was my first encounter with Manly Wade Wellman's occult detective John Thunstone. Based on this story, I certainly wouldn't mind learning more about the character. Because "Hoofs" doesn't give us much of a chance to get to know John Thunstone. The story is short, only seven pages long, and Thunstone himself only appears on the second-to-last page after a brief appearance of a only few paragraphs earlier. Instead, the bulk of the story is given over to Sharon, Countess Monteseco. As a result, we also learn a lot more about Sharon – that she is American, that her marriage was ill-advised and unhappy, that she is brave and used to solving her problems on her own, what she looks like ("compactly, blondely handsome, neither doll nor siren") – then we ever learn about John Thunstone himself.

Stories with female protagonists were rare during the golden age. So far I have reviewed only two stories with female protagonists for the Retro Reviews project, "Undersea Guardians" by Ray Bradbury and "The Gothic Window" by Dorothy Quick. "Hoofs" is the third story with a female protagonist, even though John Thunstone is nominally the hero of the series.

The shortness of the story also makes it difficult to get an idea of what the relationship between John Thunstone and Sharon is like. We learn that they've quarrelled, "a disagreement over trifles which wound up a quarrel", and that they are both proud and are having a hard time apologising to each other. In a move that's probably uncommon for the 1940s, John Thunstone takes the first step, though he does begin what he hopes will be their reconciliation with "Aren't we being childish?", which does feel condescending, particularly viewed from a 2020 point of view.

The brief phone conversation early in the story is the only time that John and Sharon actually talk, so these two certainly have a communication problem. And indeed, I had hoped for a somewhat more romantic reunion of the pair than just Sharon stumbling into John's arms during her flight from the ghostly horse and he taking her home in silence. But then the briefness of the story doesn't leave a whole lot of room for romantic interludes. In fact, if there is one complaint I have about "Hoofs", it's that the story is too short.

Rowley Thorne makes a suitably sneerworthy antagonist and his henchman Hengist is sufficiently slimy that I at least did not feel the slightest bit sorry that he got trampled to death by a ghost horse. The supernatural threat du jour in the form of an evil occultist and his slimy henchman, the risen spirit of someone the characters would very much prefer to stay dead and finally a murderous ghost horse is certainly menacing enough.

Manly Wade Wellman was a folklorist and worked on a project to collect local American folklore for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. His knowledge of folklore certainly shines through in his stories, more so in the later Silver John a.k.a. John the Balladeer stories than in the John Thunstone stories

Stories about occult detectives were a popular hybrid genre in the first half of the twentieth century and go back to Algernon Blackwood's John Silence and William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. In the US, occult detectives quickly found a home in Weird Tales, which published the adventures of Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin (who is eligible for Best Series for the 1945 Retro Hugos), Manly Wade Wellman's Judge Pursuivant and of course John Thunstone himself. Indeed, there are plenty of hints that the adventures of Jules de Grandin, Judge Pursuivant, John Thunstone and Wellman's later character Silver John a.k.a. John the Balladeer take place in the same universe and that the characters all know each other. Indeed, Judge Pursuivant is namechecked in "Hoofs", when Thunstone mentions that he is planning to get on a plane with Judge Pursuivant for some investigation far away, before he cancels his plans, once he realises Thorne is in town.

These characters are the ancestors of today's urban fantasy heroes. Their literary descendants include John Constantine, Harry Dresden, John Taylor (John is certainly a popular first name for occult detectives), Jack Winter, the Leandros brothers, the Winchester brothers and many others. And while Sharon, Countess Monteseco had to content herself with being the hero's love interest, today's occult detectives not just have formidable romantic partners like John Taylor's girlfriend/bride Suzie Shooter (nomen est omen) – no, there are also plenty of female occult detectives such as Anita Blake, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, Rachel Morgan, Dante Valentine and others.

But while today's occult detectives usually narrate their adventures in the first person in hardboiled/noir mode, older characters like John Silence, Carnacki, Jules de Grandin or Judge Pursuivant are closer to Sherlock Holmes than to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. John Thunstone is a bit of a transitional character here. He is a younger and more physically active hero than the likes of Jules de Grandin and Judge Pursuivant, a wealthy playboy with a penchant for fighting evil who is also reminiscent of Richard Wentworth a.k.a. The Spider and Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman.

However, the character that John Thunstone most reminds me of – at least based on this story – is Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician. For Mandrake is also a handsome moustachioed playboy who fights supernatural as well as false supernatural enemies with the help of his plucky aristocratic girlfriend Narda (and best friend Lothar, who has no equivalent in the John Thunstone stories). And indeed, it's interesting that all of these characters were operating at the same time.

Furthermore, the John Thunstone stories also show how the occult detective genre has changed and developed over the past seventy-five years. Early occult detectives mainly appeared in short fiction – the two John Thunstone novels only appeared in the 1980s, some forty years after the bulk of the series – whereas their modern brethren mainly appear in novels. The adventures of early occult detectives are also more episodic. Characters may reappear, see recurring antagonist Rowley Thorne, but there is little in the way of internal continuity and the stories can often be read in any order. Meanwhile, modern series, whether it’s the Dresden Files, the Nightside series, the Leandros Brothers, Kate Daniels or Mercy Thompson series, have a definite series arc.

Finally, modern series place way more emphasis on the occult detective's social and romantic life and the occult detective is usually surrounded by a network of friends, family and loved ones, often assembled across several books. Meanwhile, the occult detectives of the golden age tended to be loners with few connections aside from the occasional faithful Watson figure such as Jules de Grandin's friend/partner (and maybe more, since several folks claim to have detected homoerotic vibes between the two) Dr. Trowbridge. John Thunstone is actually something of an exception here, because he has a friend/mentor in Judge Pursuivant and a recurring love interest in Sharon Countess Monteseco. Nonetheless, their relationship takes a backseat to the supernatural mystery of the month, which is probably why the romance aspects of "Hoofs" feel a little unsatisfying from a modern POV.

That probably sounds more critical than it should, because I enjoyed "Hoofs" quite a bit and would certainly like to read more about John Thunstone's adventures. And if I had a nice print collection of the Thunstone stories rather than being forced to read them in scanned copies of vintage issues of Weird Tales on archive.org, I might well have ended up reading the whole series, which is what happened last year when I planned to reread just the one Retro Hugo nominated Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story and wound up rereading the entire series.

"Hoofs" is a neat occult detective tale in a series I would certainly like to read more of.