The Judges of the Secret Court Read Free Page A

and handsome, needed to play a role with his cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat.
    A man, then, who knew something about performance and pretending, but who had either little taste or little ability for the standard ways American novelists have of making the money needed to keep writing. The poet and translator David Slavitt, in the most substantial critical study of Stacton’s work I know of, [3] repeats the Minden, Nevada, story and retails a piquant anecdote about Stacton’s arriving by plane to be a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University, in complete though apparently not entirely convincing drag, and departing (prematurely and after a row, it seems, which Slavitt doesn’t report) in his white cowboy suit, with chaps and eye shadow. Between coming and going, he seems to have worn standard preppy attire for this his only such appointment. Instead he eked out his income with pulp fiction, written under pseudonyms. Though books like Muscle Boy , as Slavitt notes, “have had an odd Nachtleben among Queer Read fans and collectors of kitsch,” he finds it sad that Stacton, “a writer of signal refinement,” had to “grind out” such stuff.
    I wonder if this isn’t somewhat backward. Stacton wrote his potboilers and the books that he wished to be remembered by not only at the same time but with the same hand, and his literary novels exhibit methods and techniques that he, and many other pulp writers, commonly used.
    Let Him Go Hang , by “Bud Clifton,” was published in 1961, the same year as The Judges of the Secret Court . Like the last third of Judges it’s a courtroom drama; like Judges it uses an omniscient narration that visits in turn many consciousnesses both major and minor in the story. And like Judges it is about the cruelty of justice in the hands of power. Here the jury is being seated; Jan, one of the panel, is called:
    She swore. The others swore. Then they sat down. The judge told the clerk to call a jury of fourteen. Since there were thirty-six on the panel, that meant that twenty-two would have to go home without seeing justice done, or satisfying their curiosity, or whatever they were there for. Jan almost wished she was one of the ones who could go home. This was too much like a game, and a vicious one at that.
    But hers was the first name called.
    Compare a moment in the courtroom in Judges . Spangler, the man Booth asked to hold his horse while he was in Ford’s Theatre, is listening to the testimony against him:
    He began to see how easily a man could be hanged for trying to help a friend. He didn’t see that it was his fault. You don’t usually ask a friend if he’s done anything criminal, before you help him.
    Now they were talking about whether he wore a moustache. He didn’t bother to listen. He’d never worn a moustache in his life.
    That was what would save his life.
    Robert Nedelkoff has calculated (using the timelines that Stacton, in James Joyce fashion, appended to his literary novels) that most of Stacton’s books were written quickly—some in three months, none in more than nine. That’s pulp-fiction speed. Of those that I have read, most are uncomplicated as narratives: they move steadily forward in time order, as though the writer himself also moved forward page by page without looking back. This is not solely the method of the paperback writer—the esteemed Spanish novelist Javier Marías makes a point of never looking back, never altering what he first laid down—but it seems to connect these two threads of Stacton’s work.
    Likewise the cold-eyed epigram, the summary judgment, the revealing aside to the reader, that in pulp novels make for rapid storytelling. “She was a tough nut to crack, chiefly because there wasn’t much inside her,” writes Bud Clifton. The reader turning the pages of a Western or crime novel can be expected not to take notice of these common