THE TRIAL OF
Callista Blake
EDGAR PANGBORN
There is no ethical absolute that does not arise from error and illusion.
—GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, The meaning of Evolution.
St Martin's Press
New York
Copyright © Edgar Pangborn 1961
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-13391
Manufactured in the United States of America
by H. Wolff, New York
The author wishes to express his thanks to William Morrow & Company, Inc., for permission to use an excerpt from THE COURT OF LAST RESORT by Erle Stanley Gardner, Copyright 1952 by Erle Stanley Gardner; to Yale University Press for permission to use a quotation from G. G. Simpson's THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION; and to Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to use a passage from THE STORY OF MY LIFE by Clarence Darrow.
To the
Memory of
My Father
NOTE: All characters in this novel are fictitious, not intended to resemble any actual persons living or dead. The locale is semifictitious: for "New Essex" read "almost any of the northeastern States within a 300-mile radius of New York City."
E.P.
THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE
[1]
Now laws maintain their credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority: they have no other.
MONTAIGNE, Of Experience