Winding Stair

by Douglas C. Jones

Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1890, is a haven of justice presiding over thousands of square miles known as the Indian Nation, a land that harbors the most hardened criminals in the country. When a woman is found murdered, young attorney Eben Pay, newly arrived to the territory, is pulled into a posse that follows a trail of blood and destruction. Among the dead he discovers a survivor, the beautiful, traumatized Jennie Thrasher, and the question of what she witnessed hangs like a storm cloud over the investigation. From the trial to the courtroom, Winding Stair is a classic historical novel that brings to vivid life a bygone era.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Westerns, Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific sense of a time machine trip to a wild place and time in history with some engaging characters after some really bad dudes. A book blurb on the cover proclaims this “True Grit” for grown-ups. That’s pretty fair. Instead of 14-year old Mattie on a justice quest into Indian Territory, our hero is a young lawyer after some murderers in the Territory in 1890. The book shines with endearing development of this character as he moves past his boy-scout features to a wiser outlook on the complex moral choices required by life. He is challenged to quickly learn the ways of the competent and craven and find out the stuff he is made of. And that includes navigating the arc of his heart as there is a romantic element in the tale. I guess that makes this a delayed coming-of-age story, which I have much affinity for. Some special sauce for me is that I have become a fan of Doug Jones’ historical fiction and especially appreciate his portraits of life in the Ozark regions from having grown up in eastern Oklahoma.

Eben Pay arrives from St. Louis to takes up a job building cases for a prosecutor in the Ft. Smith, Arkansas, court of Judge Isaac Parker, known as the “Hanging Judge.” This federal court administered justice for felony crimes in the land of region of future Oklahoma that was dedicated to placement of ousted tribes from east of the Mississippi (mostly the five “Civilized Tribes”) and, later, ones from the west. Soon after his arrival Eben is encouraged to join a tough, experienced marshal, Oscar Schiller, and his Osage Indian assistants on a trip to investigate the rape and murder of a Choctaw woman. On the long trip to the Winding Stair part of the Ouachita Mountains in the southeastern part of the Territory Eban bonds with the Osage Joe Mountain, who educates him on tribal cultures and inspires him with his compassion. He comes to admire Schiller as a can-do guy for tracking down and arresting dangerous desperadoes , but he is wary of his ruthlessness and skills in wreaking violence.
The sense of adventure and chance to do manly things for a worthy gets tarnished by the revelations about the evil character and crimes of the men they are after. They soon learn a white merchant family, which has special permission to live in the Territory, have been killed by their quarry. A teenaged girl, Jenny, is a traumatized survivor and potential witness for the prosecution. Back in Ft. Smith, Eban befriends Jenny to draw out what she may know of the marauders or heard from her hiding place. Eban struggles with a growing romantic interest sparked her playful and sensitive ways. His dreams about her are brought back to earth as he learns she may know more than she will say and is not so innocent.

The quest to apprehend the killers leads to deepening knowledge about their identities and potential hiding places. Not all of the four suspects are white, and a couple have had such hard lives they are not playing with a full deck. There ensues much posse work and collaborative action with tribal police leading to some hairy and violent showdowns. Of course the good guys win, but Eben has work to do on his integrity and conscience, both on his naivete with respect to Jenny and on the common fate of hanging for culprits of varying guilt. Despite the press and film portrayals of Judge Parker as some kind of vengeful or Old Testament nut, he come across here as extremely decent, rational, and judicially competent. I trust Jones attention to historical detail when he reveals in this book that Parker was mandated by a federal law to hand out hanging as a punishment for the more heinous crimes in his large and challenging jurisdiction.

Jones has such a nice balance between the internal world of his main characters and the external world where of their actions. As in one of his Civil War books I read (“Elkhorn Tavern”), he provides good drama without getting melodramatic, emotional engagement without becoming sentimental, and believable immersion into historical periods and their communities. I am forever grateful to Howard for spurring me on to reading Jones.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Jones relies on none of the usual Western trappings; he eschews stereotypes....The historical research is seamless-- the story never slows down to admit dull exposition. Winding Stair convinces, utterly, that this is how life must have been in that place at that time...a significant and highly entertaining contribution to the popular literature of the American West."-- New York Times

Winding Stair takes place in Fort Smith, Arkansas and the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) during the 1890's when the U.S. Federal Court for Western Arkansas, with Judge Isaac "The Hanging Judge" Parker at the helm, also had federal jurisdiction over the Indian Territory.

Young Eben Pay is reading for the law in Fort Smith when a gang of five murderous thieves, rapists, and killers (loosely based on the Rufus Buck gang) go on a killing and raping rampage in the Territory. Deputy Marshal Oscar Schiller invites Pay to go along in an effort to capture the gang. As events unfold Pay becomes much more personally involved than he had planned.

We are also introduced to Marshal Schiller's Osage tracker, Joe Mountain. The marshal, Joe, and Eben will make subsequent appearances in Jones' novels.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one thing I always know when reading a Douglas C. Jones novel is that I will get a good story. And historical accuracy. And great characters. I got a surprise with this one as well, in that it started out as a gritty western (Ft. Smith, Arkansas and Oklahoma territory) and turned into a legal thriller, in the court of Judge Isaac Parker, a real person who was known as "the hanging Judge". We get murder and mayhem and thoroughly nasty psychopaths, pitted against Federal marshals and lawyers and tribal lawmen wanting a more civilized society. I was on the edge of my seat through most of this book.

Again, thanks to my friend Howard for introducing me to this author. This is my fifth book of his, and I will continue to read through his novels. I am also going to have to stop saying I don't read "Westerns". I've read several this year and have thoroughly enjoyed every one of them.

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb legal-thriller set in the 1890s in Fort Smith, Arkansas and the Indian Territory in and around greater Oklahoma. Fort Smith had Federal jurisdiction over dispensing justice as mandated by the President and both House and Senate. All manner of depredations were occurring involving renegade indigenous tribes members and of course soulless White men who preyed on settlers along the Western frontier as well as crimes against members of The Nations.

Young buck just out of law school but yet to take his bar exams is dispatched by his father from St. Louis to study law under the tutelage of the famous (some say infamous) Judge Parker and his chief prosecutor Evans. Instead he finds himself deputized by the court as an investigator and ordered to work under Federal Marshal Oscar Schiller in solving an apparent murder spree by a mixed gang of owlhoots.

Exciting read. Superb writing. This was the 1st appearance of Schiller in what was a proposed series featuring the marshal investigating crimes along the frontier. Sadly, the gifted author died following his third and final Oscar Schiller novel.

Recommended for legal-thriller, crime-fiction, and Western aficionados alike!

5 stars! One of my favorite reads this year.

[Chrisl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently re-read - Still a five-star recommendation. One of my six favorites by DCJ to recommend.
Winding Stair (1979 - 4.13 GR average rating
Elkhorn Tavern (1980 - 4.03 ...
Barefoot Brigade (1982 - 4.17 ...
Season of Yellow Leaf (1983 - 4.11 ... Next re-read, perhaps my favorite by author
Season of Yellow Leaf
Gone the Dreams and Dancing (1984 - 4.13 ... excellent sequel to Yellow Leaf, also sequel to Barefoot Brigade.
Roman (1986 - 4.03 ... sequel to Elkhorn
***
Winding Stair introduces Eben Pay to Oscar Schiller and Joe Mountain. The three characters appear in multiple books by the author. While fictional, they are real people in my mind and I wish they were better known of Goodreaders.
***
copied and pasted "KIRKUS REVIEW

Jones has taken believable crimes of a real gang of desperadoes from the 1890s, has surrounded the real criminals with fictitious lawmen, and gives them a fictitious trial before the real ""hanging judge"" Isaac Parker. Young Eben Pay, from St. Louis, is reading for the law in the frontier town of Fort Smith in the Indian Territory which will later become Oklahoma. (The Kirkus reviewer errs. Fort Smith is in Arkansas.)

Marshal Oscar Schiller asks Eben if he'd like to come along on a hunt for whoever raped and cut the throat of an Indian woman. What follows is a gripping legal procedural under heavy iron skies as Schiller's posse bird-dogs a gang of five men who now have added still another rape and triple murder to their foul catalogue. In part, Jones makes clear, this is a record of the frontier's social insanity brought on by alcohol, since the ringleader of the gang is an illiterate distiller who sells his goods to one and all--and the gang was dead drunk during the worst horrors laid to its ramblings. Primary witness for the prosecution: the nubile daughter of the second woman to be raped, who happened to escape harm by hiding in the attic. When she is brought back to Fort Smith, Eben falls in love with her, and she seems to return his interest, but slowly it appears that she is really trying to save one of the handsomer young rapists (he had seduced her some months before). And the trial itself turns up a surprise: Judge Parker's thorough fairness and humane concern. None of the moral force of The Ox-Bow Incident perhaps--but a gritty, lovingly etched Western-crime re-creation."

***

Between chapters 4 and 5, the book's lead character provides perspective ...

"Our private recollection of men we have known is often at variance with public judgment of them. Much of what my peers in later years know of Judge Isaac Parker came not from personal contact nor the serious and studious biographer, but from the sensational columns of newspapers.

"Parker was himself a victim of federal government reaction to a siege of lawlessness in the Indian Territory, and of misunderstanding and apathy. He was overseer of a land mostly ignored by those with power to change it, except when the news of a multiple hanging burst upon the pages of the eastern press. He was the boy crying wolf, and the wolf was always there! Yet nobody listened until the judge's pronouncement of sentence on some violent felon, and then for only a moment of horror before all of it was pushed from the mind again.

"When he took the bench in Fort Smith, capital crimes and their punishment were proscribed by law, a fact seldom remarked upon in print or on the floors of Congress. In pronouncing death sentences, Parker often explained to the condemned that the letter of the law, which he was bound to observe, left him no alternative.

"The harshness of that law was in keeping with those times. And more, it was apparently the only means that Congress had taken time to devise for assisting the Indian courts in maintaining order in their own countries. Ironically, Parker himself knew as well as any man the genesis and evolution of the condition. He outlined it for me in those first weeks I spent working for his court in Fort Smith.

"Long ago, before the first white men came, the Osage were there. There were others as well, but largely, the Osage held domain. Early in the nineteenth century, other tribes, powerful tribes, began to arrive from the southeast. At first they came of their own accord, and in small numbers, but later they were being forcibly removed by the United States government, under pressure from white citizens who coveted the Indian farms in the eastern mountains and the Deep South. These displaced persons were called the Five Civilized Tribes and they were herded into the country west of the place where the Poteau and Arkansas rivers flow together. They established societies in the new land that were self-governing and self-contained. They were the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee.

"But in the original treaties with the United States that gave them the land forever was a serious disclaimer. Their laws and police and courts were only for their own people. They had no jurisdiction over white men.

"At first, this seemed of little consequence. They tilled their fields and ran their legislatures and punished their own lawbreakers. But when the Civil War came, many fought for the South and afterward, because of this, large tracts of their land were taken from them to be used as reserves for other tribes. Only the eastern portion of what had been called Indian Territory remained. The Nations.

"Into all of this vast area both east and west, the Indians of North America were moved as the expanding nation pressed outward into open spaces and inward upon itself. They came from everywhere. There were the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Shawnee, the Erie. The Chippawa, the Kickapoo, the Ottawa. The Pawnee, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Tonkawa, the Kaw, Modoc, Sac, and Fox and many more. Strangers, old friends, old enemies--all placed near one another without regard for cultural differences, without regard for hopes or fears, aspirations or despairs.

"And there were also, after the war, the black peoples who had been slaves to the various Civilized Tribes, freed now and made a part of the tribes of which they had once been mere property.

"By 1889, the western part of what had been the original Indian Territory was opened to white settlement by land run. The first one came in the Unassigned Lands, almost dead center of the old Territory and just west of the Civilized Tribes' Nations. The whites came and claimed the land and a new city sprang up overnight. It was called Guthrie, this new capital of the new white Territory of Oklahoma. And rather quickly, the Indian lands became white lands, by run or lottery or sealed bid. But there was still The Nations, bordering on Arkansas to the east. Still sovereign, with the one important disclaimer.

"By now, railroads and stage routes were being run through the lands of the Civilized Tribes, and with these came whites in growing numbers. And with these came the scum and the renegade rabble from all the dwindling frontier, because the Indian courts had no power over them, and the Indian police were restrained from controlling them. These came to escape the law of established states and territories, and they were a brutish and mindless breed. ...

"The federal court at Fort Smith was established partly to respond to all of this. The task was a thankless and impossible one.

"'We have been damned by many,' Judge Parker once told me. 'But this is a ruthless land. Ruthless because our handling of it has made it so. But ... there will be no lynch mobs. Eben, let me point it out, there are no such mobs in The Nations. Under circumstances in which they live, this is credit to them, and a little to us as well.

"The day was near when many territorial courts would be formed throughout The Nations to maintain some semblance of civilized society there. But when I knew him, Judge Isaac Parker and his deputy marshals carried that burden alone."

***

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fiction book that reads like non-fiction. It seems that accurate. It details the lawless 1890 era in the area around Fort Smith, Arkansas. And the hanging judge, Isaac C. Parker, is one of the characters.

The core protagonist and narrator is Eben Pay, a journalist sent from IL. He tells his tale of travels and inquiry for his assignment.

It's brutal, and some of the minutia of the men who commit the most horrendous crime of the novel (5 of number in their gang/group at Winding Stair) is absolutely feral in nature.

It's a man's book, IMHO. Not that it lacks any particularly defined women characters. There are several, three with dialogue. But most of them are either dead (can't talk) or too afraid to talk. Until an eventual surround by some more civilized and lawful types, anyway.

They (lawmen and the posse of associates that serve as support) deal with their "no-go" zones in manners that would never fly presently. Neither in city or in country. Justice becomes served, as justice was deemed to be served at the time. Closely eye for an eye and also within days or at most weeks. Quickly. Consequences are not delayed. Nor are the trials lengthy. Murder seems as nothing, done for less than a horse or $28. Or just because.

No one has good teeth or a wholeness to their complete physical being in this book, it seems. Even Eben is either vomiting or suffering some issue, like a broken nose. The animals have it worse.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've just reread this book and I was struck at how good it is. In a just world Douglas C. Jones would have died rich and famous-- not just for this book either, Elkhorn Tavern and Weedy Rough spring to mind-- and the likes of James Patterson and Stuart Woods would be teaching creative writing at Dartmouth or Duke or some other post-modernist hell hole.

[Rich]

This is the fifth book in the series about the Hasford family, which started with Elkhorn tavern. Jones wrote these historical fiction masterpieces from about 1980 to the late 90’s. What’s fascinating about them is that he brings the reader to Civil War era Arkansas and Missouri—places not often written about—during an incredibly interesting time in history. This book takes place in the 1890’s. I can’t wait to delve into the the rest of his acclaimed books.

[Georgetowner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great writing with very interesting characters that ring true. However, this is not my usual genre and it was much too gritty for me to enjoy it. To quote Abraham Lincoln, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”, I am not among them. I read this as part of a Winter reading challenge by a local used book store. I appreciate the boundary stretching.

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the discovery of a woman who had been raped and murdered in the Choctaw Nation in the shadow of the Winding Stair Mountains, a posse is formed to seek out the guilty party and bring them to justice. The year is 1890, a time when murder, horse theft, and whiskey smuggling are a normal occurrence going hand in hand with bouts of drunkenness. Newly arrived to town Eben Pay who has secured a position as clerk and investigator for the prosecuting attorney William Evans is recruited by Marshall Oscar Schiller as one of the posse.

Hot on the trail of the men responsible for the murder, the posse comes up on a farm where they find the owner Thomas Thrasher brutally murdered along with his farm hands. Thrasher’s wife is missing, but the Marshall locates Thrasher’s daughter Jenny hiding in the attic in a state of shock. The girl is unable to identify any of the killers, but under questioning from Marshall Schiller, they learn that a whiskey peddler had been by the farm recently so they set off to locate the man.

In the midst of a gunfight one of the wanted men is killed, and one of his cohorts is apprehended and brought back to Fort Smith along with two other of the accused to stand trial and face the possibility of death.

“Winding Stair” is an all out western in which Douglas C. Jones creates a cast of characters and storylines that will keep the reader captivated until the conclusion. Republished posthumously to showcase his work I realized it is a shame we have lost such a talented author as this.

Reviewed by Jodi Hanson for Suspense Magazine

[Marie Carmean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-written, fascinating historical novel! It is based loosely on the Winding Stair Massacre event at Fort Smith Arkansas in 1890. Douglas Jones is heralded as one of the best Western historical novel writers, perhaps of all time. The Library Journal said "Jones may do for the Western historical novel what John Ford did for the Western film." And I heartily agree! I could SEE this book as a movie as I read it, and wondered if one had been made, but unfortunately could not find evidence of one. In the novel Eben Pay has come to read law and work in the court system at Fort Smith. Not only is he pulled into helping to investigate the crimes that were committed there he ultimately finds himself emotionally invested in the event. His journey into understanding the criminal mind and finding himself in the process is beautifully expressed. The characters from the real Judge Parker, to invented Schiller the Sheriff and big Indian Joe Mountain are wonderfully drawn. Not least of the characters one come to know well are Jennie Thrasher, the beautiful but naive young woman Eben himself becomes fascinated with, and Johnny Boins, the handsome charming evil man who despoils the girl and goes on the commit atrocities. The other criminals involved in this tale are equally colorful. The court case is wonderfully well-researched and holds the reader. This book is crafted so well one could never consider it among the penny-novel westerns that are often so popular. It is real writing about a real subject and it hits home for the reader in a big way!

[Edwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Indian Nations is an area that has intrigued me. I imagine it as a huge island of wildness in the middle of a developing America. I suppose a lot of stories are set there. Judge Parker is the tough guy who tries to protect the innocent inhabitants. The book by Douglas C. Jones about the Marshall in the Indian Nations is a comfortable return to this wild and wooly land.

A young lawyer, Eben Pay, accompanies one of Judge Parker's Marshalls, Cap'n Oscar Schiller and Joe Mountain, an Osage Indian, into "The Nation" in search of the perpetrators of a series of vicious killings.

Historical novels should give a distinct sense of time and place along with interesting and memorable characters and this book succeeds in this. The story pulls you in and the end comes too soon.

[Glenna Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Douglas’ books. He’s an Arkansas author who focuses his stories around the Ozarks. This one takes place in Ft. Smith, 1890’s, during Judge Parker’s tenure. It’s an excellent western read telling lots of rich history with a diversity of characters. It’s written in the vernacular of the times. There was no such thing as politically correct and his characters attitudes and social mores reflect the time period. I am very curious to read more about The Nations and the Native American history just across the border from Arkansas. There is a lot of African American history mixed up with The Nations that I find fascinating and would like to know more about. This book features Eban Pay who was briefly mentioned in the Elkhorn series trilogy, which is not to missed either.

[Luanne Coats · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting story of murder in "The Nations", Indian Territory in 1890 and the posse sent out from Ft. Smith's "Hanging" Judge parker's court to track down the murderers. As one reviewer put it--True Grit for grown-ups. Eben Pay is the young lawyer sent to work in Ft. Smith by his father, Alan Eben Pay, of Mr. Jones' novel, "Elkhorn Tavern". Interesting characters of multple races all living in the Arkansas/Oklahoma border.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm from Arkansas, and Fort Smith, Arkansas was a wild and wooly town once upon a time. Many outlaws hung out in the Indian Nation across the river from Fort Smith, in what is now Oklahoma. This is a story set in Fort Smith and was very interesting just for that reason to me. But Jones is a good writer with a good grasp of historical detail.

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I’m partial to Westerns and this is a really good one. Set in 1890, the novel takes place in Fort Smith, Arkansas and the area west across the Arkansas River, in what was then known as “The Nations,” the territory (now Oklahoma) to which several Indian tribes had been displaced. Several gruesome crimes have been committed in The Nations, near the Winding Stair Mountains, and a group of lawmen—Indian, Black, and white—set out seeking the perpetrators. Among these is Eben Pay, a law clerk recently arrived from St. Louis. He’s not called this in the novel, but he’s pretty much of a city-slicker, more at home in high society than the frontier West, which at that time Fort Smith and The Nations certainly were. The description of a gathering to watch a prize fight on July the 4th captures the frontier spirit and energy of both Fort Smith and the region, as well as the cultural legend of the American melting pot:

In that sea of faces, one came to realize how cosmopolitan this little frontier city had become. The Irish and English from the barges and the railroads, the German brewery workers and the Jewish shopkeepers. Gas well drillers and cotton farmers, the hill people and the flatlands garden farmers, the blacks who worked in the city and the ones across the river who were now part of various Indian tribes. And the tribesmen themselves. The Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. And the Cherokee, on whose land the spectacle was being waged. Walking through the crowds one could hear two dozen different languages, see all shades of skin pigmentation, all manner and texture of hair, all color and shape of eyes. It was a seething, writhing human stew, set off here along the border of the last continental Indian frontier, a place passaged by the old pioneer wagon routes to the West or the newer railroads building toward the Pacific. A backwater in time, with a surging energy and life all its own, unique among all places as it celebrated the one hundred and fourteenth year of national independence.

While the effort to track down the lawbreakers and bring them to justice is the thrust of the novel, there are many subplots, one of the most important being Eben’s gradual adaptation to frontier life. By the end of the novel, he’s comfortable carrying a gun and hanging out with the sheriff and his roughshod men, now more at home in Fort Smith and The Nations than in St. Louis. In a sense he has rediscovered his masculinity through his frontier experiences, the man of the office becoming the man of action (or at least, a man more of action). His values and understanding of racism have also changed, as working with Blacks and Indians has opened his eyes to their humanity and the prejudices leveled against them. At one point Eben watches a Creek lawman with whom he has worked alongside of set off to trap a violent murderer, and he finds himself thinking: “It was a strange sensation, this admiration for a man with whom I had so little in common, and had he appeared at my home in Saint Louis, I suspected my mother would feed him at the back door and send him quickly away.”

Not just here but throughout the novel the complexities of race circulate, perhaps nowhere more visible than in the situations of Blacks who have moved into The Nations and assimilated into the tribes. Their situation underscores the fluidity of racial identity as well as the limits of that fluidity. One such assimilated Black comments that he and others like him look forward to the day when The Nations becomes a territory of the US so that they can be a part of American rather than of Indian society. Eben’s response: “Here was a black man, legally a red one, anxious to go from the society that had nurtured him. I could understand why he’d feel he didn’t belong in red culture, but I wasn’t sure he’d find it any different when he became a part of the white one. There was an uncertainty in the man standing now with one foot in either, not satisfied with his lot among the Creeks and unsure of his future with the whites.” Eben’s comment points to the complicated racial dynamics central to the American experience and the novel.

Central, too are, matters of justice, and here as well the issues are complicated. Who should administer justice in The Nations? How impartial is the court in Fort Smith? What are we to make of lawmen risking their lives who at the same time dishonestly profit from their work by manipulating reward payments and overestimating cost reports, as well as by accepting perks from companies such as the railroads. Nothing is simple in Winding Stair, which of course is one of novel’s great strengths.

When Winding Stair came out in England, the publisher changed the title to the more explosive and eye-catching, The Winding Stair Massacre. This title may have been more effective in nabbing readers, but the original title works better in suggesting the central concern of the novel: the steep and precarious path toward growth and enlightenment that Eben (and more generally the nation) is climbing, an ascent we only hope is not Sisyphean.

[Juli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book would make a great movie. In fact, I kept imagining the scenes as they would play out on the big screen. The first half shot mostly in the dark, lots of action and suspence; the second half more like a courtroom drama, with the “twist” at the end. The final scene: the china dog floating away in the river...
However, the book is not nearly as exciting as the movie version could be. Unfortunately, it read more like a historical account of a true crime rather than the thriller it ought to have been. In fact, the writing was so dry and matter-of-fact, I could never get properly immersed in the story (other than imagining how I would translate it on to film). I generally don’t like first person narratives, but that might not have bothered me as much in this case had the narrator been a little less dull. Actually, I don’t quite get the admiration towards Eben Pay (except for his great name) by the other characters. Besides acting like a fool most times, he doesn’t seem to be doing much at all, especially not towards advancing the case of the prosecutor.
Still, Winding Stair was an interesting account of crime and justice in the Indian Nation circa 1890; it just wasn’t a particularly good novel. 3.5

[Iván · Rating 2 out of 5]

Considero que el tema es excelente, el viejo oeste, indios, un asesinato entre medio de todo y un joven abogado aprendiz que va en busca de los bandidos. Pero a pesar de todo esto esto, nunca pude conectar con el texto. No se si habrá sido la traducción deficiente (en muchas partes decía "hubieron" en vez de "hubo") o el autor simplemente no le supo sacar el jugo a sus personajes explórandolos más allá. Yo le habría sacado personajes y elementos y le habría agregado profundidad a cada uno. Las últimas páginas estuvieron muy buenas eso sí 👍

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, but it's not the best of the series of these books. Where as Elkhorn Tavern, Barefoot Brigade, and Roman are about a father and a son in the Arkansas wilderness before, during, and immediately after the civil war, this one is much later and deals with the grandson.

But there was very little connection with this and the other books. It's just a readable western.

[Boris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb historical novel based in the last days of the Old West on the cusp of the 20th century. The novel is loosely based on the Rufus Buck gang and gives a sense of the times and the places and the people in the Indian Nations and the South after the closing of the frontier.

[Cole Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the grestest books that I have ever read! I really enjoyed it. It did have a few problems but every book has it's problems. This book was full of twists and turns that kept me wanting more. Very good!

[Dick Spiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story, well written!

[tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Winding Stair goes on my list of DNF books.

It's too bad because the book starts out on fire, really good through maybe the first 30 pages but then it devolves into a self-centered first-person narrative told from the viewpoint of a totally unlikeable-to-me ass. Credibility goes away quickly; we're supposed to just accept a greenhorn city slicker law school graduate being elevated to the position of marshal in charge of a group of hardened territorial policemen tracking down a band of murderers? What?! I'm sorry but this is a boy among men who's done nothing of any substance, a hanger-on who inexplicably is handed the lead in an investigation involving people he has no understanding of in a geographical area as foreign to him as the moon, a boy who's already made a public fool of himself more than once. It makes no sense. And did I mention Eben Pay is unlikeable? Oh yeah, I did. And to think I put down True Grit to pick up this waste of Kindle battery because I've read True Grit multiple times. I should have listened to my inner self and moved to another Portis book.

My apologies to those who gave Winding Stair big stars. The writing is not awful, the story has loads of potential, but in my opinion Mr. Jones placed the narrative in the hands of the worst possible character. If Eben Pay had been written a little older, less gullible, if he had remained a non-obnoxious background observer and simply sat back and told the story as the inexperienced observer he is rather than the windbag the author created the story would have worked for me. Again, my opinion.

Maybe I'll pick it back up. Surely there's more to the story than I've read, some dangling loose ends to be tied up in some predictable way. Maybe Eben Pay's naivete will get him shot off his horse as he should be and the story can get on without him; maybe, but not bloody likely.

[John Hanscom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story about the Old West, when the Old West was Arkansas!!!!!!! The author's character development in the protagonist was superb.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not super interesting. Good character development though.