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Winding Stair
324 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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December 11, 2025
This is a coming-of-age story thinly disguised as a western. Callow young lawyer Eben Pay leaves a sheltered life in St. Louis to work for the "Hang Judge" in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He does a lot of growing up while suffering from unrequited love and assisting with a murder and rape investigation on what was then still the frontier, not least because it bordered Indian country.
Douglas C. Jones put me right back in 1890, which is no small thing, but I found the story depressing, and only an Osage Indian named Joe Mountain helps to relieve the gloom throughout the manuscript.
I read this book because I remember the stirring courtroom scenes in the same writer's The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer. That exercise in alternate history seems buoyant compared to the darkness in this story, which, to be fair, also features a crackerjack courtroom chapter.
Douglas C. Jones put me right back in 1890, which is no small thing, but I found the story depressing, and only an Osage Indian named Joe Mountain helps to relieve the gloom throughout the manuscript.
I read this book because I remember the stirring courtroom scenes in the same writer's The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer. That exercise in alternate history seems buoyant compared to the darkness in this story, which, to be fair, also features a crackerjack courtroom chapter.
Displaying 1 of 1 review