Books: More in Anger

THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT (255 pp.)—David Stacton—Pantheon ($3.95).

“Historical novelists seldom write in anger. In telling about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his killer, John Wilkes Booth, and the near-farcical trial of Booth’s fellow “conspirators,” Author Stacton is clearly angry, but not at Booth; shrewdly enough, he treats him with pitying contempt. His target is the injustice that was done not only to Booth’s largely duped friends but to the murderer’s family as a result of his tragically stupid and criminal act.

The story is familiar, but Author Stacton gives it dramatic freshness with a spare, stabbing style and attention only to the details that count. His few pages on Lincoln combine tribute and admiration with a down-to-earth recognition of the man’s human vulnerability. But it is the peripheral characters who take on fascination, partly because they are pitiable, but also because they are victims by association. Booth’s sorry hangers-on, with one exception (Payne, who did attempt to murder Secretary of State Seward), are merely frightened and bewildered. And poor Mary Surratt, kind, dignified and finally broken, goes to the gallows wondering at the inhumanity she can hardly comprehend. Stacton’s villain is Secretary of War Stanton who organized the military trial, hand-picked the judges and suborned witnesses.

Author Stacton has the knack of making even his novelist’s liberties seem like living history. His John Wilkes Booth is all actor—shallow, vain and no more determined to eliminate Lincoln from the stage of history than to give John Wilkes a place on it. With his good looks, sonorous voice and flashy clothes, he could make himself attractive not only to women but to second-rate men who took him for a leader. To Booth, the cause of the South was the cause of gentlemen, and above all the little actor wanted to be recognized as a gentleman—to the very end, when he offered to fight it out with the troop of cavalrymen who surrounded him in a Virginia tobacco barn.