Dark Detectives by Stephen Jones

Author:Stephen Jones [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

John Thunstone

ROUSE HIM NOT

by MANLY WADE WELLMAN

Manhattan playboy and dilettante John Thunstone is almost too big to be reassuring, and most of his clothes have to be tailored especially for him. His hands and his eyes are sensitive, his big nose has been twice broken, and his black hair and moustache show a little streaking of grey.

A serious student of the occult and a two-fisted brawler ready to take on any enemy, he is armed with potent charms and a silver swordcane as he stalks supernatural perils through the exclusive night clubs of New York or in backwater towns lost in the countryside—seeking out deadly sorcery wherever he discovers it.

John Thunstone first appeared in 1943, after Farnsworth Wright retired as the editor of Weird Tales and was succeeded by Dorothy McIlwraith. She and her associate, Lamont Buchanan, sat down with Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) for several careful discussions about how the character might look and act.

The result of these meetings was the publication of ‘The Third Cry of Legba’ in the November 1943 edition of Weird Tales. Over the next eight years, fourteen more stories appeared in the famous pulp magazine, concluding with ‘The Last Grave of Lill Warren’ in the May 1951 issue.

Several of the Thunstone stories pitted the investigator against a wizard named Rowley Thorne, who the author admitted he had based on the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley, as well as a fearful race of beings called The Shonokins.

All these stories were collected in Lonely Vigils (1981), and Wellman subsequently revived the character for two novels, transplanting Thunstone to the author’s beloved England for What Dreams May Come (1983), and once again pitting the psychic adventurer against his sworn enemy Rowley Thorne in The School of Darkness (1985). All the John Thunstone short stories (plus those featuring his fellow phantom-fighter Lee Cobbett) were collected by editor John Pelan in The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations (2000), the first volume in the “Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman”.

The following tale was originally published in the special Occult Detectives issue of Kadath (July, 1982), and it was later adapted by Michel Parry for a 1988 episode of the TV series Monsters, starring Alex Cord as John Thunstone.

THE SIDE ROAD in from the paved highway was heavily graveled but not tightly packed except for two ruts. John Thunstone’s black sedan crept between trees that wove their branches together overhead. Gloom lay in the woods to right and left. Once or twice he thought he heard a rustle of movement there. Maybe half a mile on, he came to the house.

It was narrow and two-storied, of vertical planks stained a soft brown. A tan pickup truck was parked at a front corner. Thunstone got out of the sedan. He was big and powerfully built, with gray streaks in his well-combed dark hair and trim mustache. He wore a blue summer suit. In one broad hand he carried a stick of spotted wood with a bent handle and a silver band, but he did not lean on it.

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