Gary Stuart's Books

About Gary

I earned degrees in business and law at the University of Arizona, and practiced law in Phoenix Arizona with Jennings, Strouss & Salmon from 1967 to 1998. I started my own solo practice in 1999 am now a part-time lawyer with a focus on ethics and professional discipline.

I teach creative writing and ethics to law students at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. I write every day. My stack includes hundreds of short stories, articles, monologues, op-eds, teaching materials, CLE materials, and blogs about writing and writers. I write about the American civil and criminal justice systems. My characters include invented—or real—lawyers, cowboys, cowgirls, judges, clients, old west heroes, outlaws, in-laws, and horses. I use the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments to the United States Constitution as characters and solutions in all of my books. The Old West may be thought of as lawless, but the people of the 1800s knew about justice. So, justice is the narrative arc in all my books.

Gallup, Tucson, and Darlene are my horses; they’ve taught me a good deal about who I am over the last thirty years. Ten Shoes Up was the first of a three-book novel series set in the 1880s along the New Mexico Colorado border. My protagonist, Angus, is an iconic 1880s cowboy. Mostly, he rides alone in the high country on the New Mexico-Colorado border looking for outlaws, in-laws, and trouble. It comes to him naturally, especially when he talks his horse into crossing a new river. These books can’t be booted down into the traditional Western genre. They chronicle the challenges that young men and women faced at the turn of the 19th Century.

My nonfiction true-crime books focus on trials and tribulations from the 1930s to 2015. From the perspective of justice and due process, they repeat much of what happened in the 1880s. I don’t write about the future, but I can always hope that justice and the rule of law will be alive and well long after I’ve tried my last case and written my last book.

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