The Judges of the Secret Court A Novel About John Wilkes Booth

David Stacton#x19;s long-lost novel The Judges of The Secret Court will allow contemporary readers to discover for the first time a hidden masterpiece of American fiction that is one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War. Stacton#x19;s gripping story centers on the brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, members of a famous theatrical family. Edwin is a great actor, a Hamlet-like character whose performances of Hamlet will make him an international sensation. Wilkes is a blustering mediocrity on stage who is determined, however, to be an actor in history, and whose assassination of Abraham Lincoln will change America. Stacton#x19;s novel about how the roles we play become, for better or for worse, the lives we lead, takes us back to the day of the assassination, immersing us in the farrago of bombast that fills Wilkes#x19;s head while following his footsteps up to the fatal, but weirdly anti-climatic, encounter at the Ford Theater. The political maneuvering around Lincoln#x19;s deathbed and Wilkes#x19;s desperate flight and ignominious capture then set the stage for a political show trial that will condemn not only the guilty but the-relatively-innocent. For as Edwin Booth broods helplessly many years later, and as Lincoln, whose tragic death and wisdom overshadow this tale, also knew, #x1C;We are all accessories before or after some fact...We are all guilty of being ourselves.#x1D;

David Stacton was born Lionel Kingsley Evans in San Francisco. He attended Stanford University before serving in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector during World War II , eventually graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1951. Stacton went to Europe after college and ended up staying, in his words, “because I liked it and because I could not get my books in print in America.” His first novel, Dolores, was published in England in 1954. Among the wide-ranging historical and biographical novels for which he would become best known are On a Balcony, about Nefertiti and Pharaoh Akhenaten; Segaki, set in feudal Japan; A Signal Victory, about the Spanish conquest of the Yucatán; Old Acquaintance, set at a film festival and telling of the loves of a star resembling Marlene Dietrich; and People of the Book, set during the Thirty Years’ War. Under various pseudonyms, Stacton also published Westerns, mass-market murder mysteries, and a soft-core gay novel. Twice the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he also received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1968 he moved to Fredensborg, Denmark, to work on a book to be called Restless Sleep, about Charles II and the diarist Samuel Pepys; ten days later he was found dead in his new home; he was forty-four years old.

John Crowley is the author of a dozen novels and works of fiction, among them Little, Big and the Ægypt Cycle, and, most recently, Four Freedoms. He is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and a winner of the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Crowley teaches creative writing at Yale University. His reviews and critical essays have appeared in the Boston Review, The Yale Review, and The Washington Post.