The Judges of the Secret Court: A Novel About John Wilkes Booth (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

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.

“Far more than just “a novel about John Wilkes Booth,” The Judges of the Secret Court — haunting title — depicts the complex aftershock of the Lincoln assassination on a surprisingly large circle of people, including the various conspirators, the famous Booth family of actors and the Washington politicos who seize on the death of the president for their own purposes....What most surprises about this “historical” novel is its urbane, mildly epigrammatic style. Stacton is never florid or old-fashioned. He writes with lean economy and speed....The Judges of the Secret Court isn’t just a novel about John Wilkes Booth; it is a vision of what life and the world do to us.” -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"David Stacton is an original, finely pitched voice in American fiction. I own most of his books and have enjoyed every one. He deserves to return." —Larry McMurtry

“The Judges of the Secret Court is a superior historical fiction, accurate in detail, moving and compelling narrative and character. But it is something more than this as well, an exploration by a brilliant and thoughtful writer of the labyrinthine ways of good and evil.”  —Robert R. Kirsch, Los Angeles Times