E.S. Raye

When I’m figuring out my main characters, I like to fall back on one trope in particular: the Freudian Trio.

Once you’re aware of this trope, you start to see it everywhere, but perhaps the best example of it is Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy.

McCoy is the emotional id; Spock, the logical superego; Kirk the ego, balancing the other two with conscious thought.

In Gas Giant Gambit, Gus is the ego, Moe is the emotional id, and Marshal Ray Gascon is the logical, rule-following superego.

Marshal Ray

When we first meet Ray, he’s an old man who loves his coffee with a little whiskey and is doing his best to keep the peace in town while turning a blind eye to basically everything else.

There’s a lot of “going along to get along” to Ray.

He follows and enforces the town charter, albeit with a relatively soft hand. He’s a good man, liked by the townsfolk, but he’s tired and feels like he owes the town administrator, Laszlo Leconte, a lot. And he’s not exactly wrong.

You see, Laszlo and Ray grew up together, and Ray watched Laszlo’s back when they were kids. So, when it came time to establish Las Rafagas, Laszlo knew who to call.

The law says that, in order to be recognized as an outpost, you need a post office and a marshal.

Ray, who’d recently been injured on the job, jumped at the chance.

Now, Ray’s been there a while. Gotten comfortable. And here comes trouble on the horizon.

Ray’s Inspiration

While some of the characters in Gas Giant Gambit may or may not be inspired by real world people, only Ray was inspired by someone I know personally: Ray’s namesake, my late grandfather.

Growing up, I lived very close to my maternal grandparents, and thus spent a lot of time with them, both before I started kindergarten and well after. I have truckloads of memories from that house, but one genre of memory is relevant here: my grandfather loved Westerns. As I look back, it felt like there was always one or another on.

The very instant I knew I was writing a Western (of sorts), I knew I had to put my grandfather in it.

Of course the Ray that appears in Gas Giant Gambit went through several iterations before he became what he is in those pages now. In the final draft, Marshal Ray doesn’t really resemble my grandfather Ray too much, except in two, important ways:

First, his features. From his inception, whenever I picture Ray, I see my grandfather, with his bushy moustache, steel-grey and black hair, and squat but solid frame.

The other thing is his quiet kindness. That’s my grandfather through and through.