Polygamists, Outlaws & Mormons: The Crime and Western Tales of Gary Stewart
by Ben Boulden
Gary Stewart wrote two outstanding mystery
novels set among Utah’s Mormons during the turbulent 1980s featuring the cool, ironic,
humorous, and capable private eye, Gabriel Utley. The Tenth Virgin,
published by St. Martin’s Press in 1983, is about murder, conspiracy, and polygamy.
The sort of polygamy Mormon founder, Joseph Smith Jr., embraced in the mid-nineteenth
century and the Mormon Church abandoned five decades later. The Zarahemla
Vision (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), focused on corporate corruption, racism,
and the succession from one Mormon prophet to the next. Kirkus called The
Tenth Virgin, “a lively debut,” and Publishers Weekly applauded
The Zarahemla Vision’s “marvelously intricate mystery,” the believable
and often “crazed” characters and its “fascinating looks at modern Mormonism.”
But writing novels was a sideline gig
for the talented and energetic Stewart. He held a doctorate in theater
criticism from the University of Iowa and spent 36 years in academia. He taught
theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMASS), and then at
Indiana State University (ISU). During his teaching career, according to his 2018
obituary, “[Stewart] was Artistic Director of the professional SummerStage Repertory
Company for 24 years… [and] directed some seventy productions[.]” He wrote
seven plays that were produced for the stage: “two were published and three
were produced professionally, among them Downwinder Dance and Mary
and Joe.”
Downwinder Dance is described as a comedic “tale of two
peculiar people who find romance in a mysterious old barn near a nuclear test
site.” Its title, Downwinder, comes from the term used to describe those
living downwind from the Nevada Nuclear Test Site (including, Arizona,
Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) during the 1950s and
early-1960s.
Sara Gilbert, made famous by her role
as Darlene Connor on television’s Rosanne, made her stage debut in Downwinder
Dance at The Cincinnati Playhouse in 1992. The play was described by the Terre
Haute Tribune Star as, “[coming] across as a delightful ballet, twirling
and twisting its way from the stage and into the heart of its audience.”
He was born on March 5, 1937, as Gary
L Stewart – according to his
daughter, “the L stands for nothing” – to Gabriel Lavirl Stewart and Vera Miles Stewart in Salt Lake
City, Utah. He was raised in Kaysville, a northern Utah town, and Gary’s father
was the distributing agent for the Salt Lake Tribune in Kaysville’s
larger neighbor, Ogden. His mother Vera suffered with bipolar disorder, and
during periods when she was hospitalized with the illness, Gary lived with an aunt
in rural Tooele County, Utah. What must have been a terrible feeling of abandonment
during his mother’s absences informs Stewart’s published fiction since his two
fictional heroes, Gabe Utley and Miles Utley, are both orphans, abandoned by
their parents through death.
Gary served a proselytizing mission for
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon
Church, to London, England, in 1955 and 1956. He graduated from Brigham
Young University with a B.A., where he performed in several stage plays as an
undergraduate, including Angel in a Pawnshop and Oedipus Rex. He
married Diana Louise Markham in September 1961. They had two daughters, Beth
and Emily. Beth was born while Stewart was completing his doctoral studies at
the University of Iowa, and Emily was born after Stewart had taken a teaching
post at UMASS.
Stewart was inspired to write a
western, Avenging Angel, after his wife Diana signed a contract to write
romance novels for Silhouette in the late-1970s. Diana’s Silhouette titles
– there are six listed on Goodreads – were published as by Diana Dixon. Diana
also adapted at least a dozen literary classics for young readers in the
Raintree Short Classics series, including Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre
Dame.
Avenging Angel is set on the Mormon frontier in the
violent years after the Utah War (1857-58) and populated with real-life characters,
including the outlaws Orrin Porter Rockwell and Bill Hickman, and the Mormon
prophet, Brigham Young. It was written “in longhand on legal pads” in 1979-80. It
was written for a writing contest and was never published, but TNT produced
a watchable 1995 television movie using Stewart’s manuscript as its basis. Tom
Berenger starred as the hero, Miles Utley, and James Coburn played Porter
Rockwell with Charlton Heston as Brigham Young. In a 1995 Los Angeles Times interview,
Berenger said it was the manuscript’s religious bent that appealed to him as an
actor and “made it different [from] other Westerns.”
It’s
that same off-beat “religious bent,” along with Stewart’s kind and honest handling
of Utah’s Mormon culture of the 1980s, that make his two Gabe Utley novels special.
In The Tenth Virgin, New York City private eye Gabriel Utley returns to
his native Salt Lake City. A place he thought he would never return after his
uncle, who raised Gabe on Salt Lake’s east side, died years earlier. Gabe’s
non-member status with the Church, what Mormon’s call a gentile, made
him an outsider in the community.
Gabe
is back at the request of his high school sweetheart, Linda Peterson, when her teenage
daughter Jennifer runs away from home. Jennifer’s father, David, is a wealthy
and high-ranking official in the Mormon Church that is unconcerned about his
wayward daughter. As he tells Gabe, “[my] thought would be just let it go.” His
ambivalence is caused by Jennifer’s reason for leaving. She married the leader
of a violent Southern Utah polygamist sect, and her polygyny marriage would be damaging
to her father’s religious ambitions because the Mormon Church no longer
tolerates polygamy. It excommunicates any members practicing what it calls plural
marriage and David is afraid his daughter’s actions will reflect back on
him. Gabe, mostly alone and facing plenty of danger, follows the clues from the
heights of Salt Lake City’s Mormondom to the poverty of Southern Utah, and back
again.
Stewart’s
knack for capturing Mormonism’s unique culture, from its hierarchical structure
to its more endearing family-centric attitudes, with a sly and kind humor make The
Tenth Virgin something of a time capsule of Utah and Mormonism in the
1980s. It’s obvious Stewart paid attention to the people and the cultural structure of his
childhood religion. The characters are recognizably Mormon, from the misogynistic
and often violent bigamist fundamentalists to the paternalistic and authoritarian
Church leadership – which one character notes, “[you] don’t find a whole lot of
sentimentality among those tough old birds who run the Church” – to the meek
and strong women.
In The Zarahemla Vision Gabe finds
himself stalled in Salt Lake City without much happening except for an on-again
and off-again romance with the beautiful and exciting Mona McKinley. Mona is a
non-Mormon reporter working for the Church-owned Deseret News. Her
contrarian views, women’s rights among them, keep the paper’s management
suspicious of everything she does. When Gabe’s Aunt Hattie asks for help
tracking down her son Parley – who claims to have kidnapped the Mormon prophet,
Wilford Richards, at the request of an angel – Gabe reluctantly agrees to help.
But Parley’s disappearance fits into a much larger conspiracy. Shortly after
Hattie asks for Gabe’s help, the Church announces Richards’ death, although his
body isn’t being shown publicly. Then a prominent Native American Mormon is
murdered, and an official Church file, called the Zarahemla File (rumored
to be a new revelation given to Richards), goes missing. More perplexing to
Gabe is Mona’s mysterious connections to whatever is happening in Mormondom.
The Zarahemla Vision’s plot flirts with confusion: a bunch
of stuff is happening and much of it is, as one character says, “weird.” The plot’s oddities come from the Nephite and Lamanite tales in the Book of Mormon. The
Nephites were righteous followers of Christ in the New World and described as
“white and delightsome” while the Lamanites were “cursed with dark skin”
because of their wickedness. The Lamanites caused wars, sacked the great Nephite
city of Zarahemla, and ultimately annihilated the Nephites. This
mythology, along with the Mormon theology that modern Native Americans are
descendants of the Lamanites, plays into the story admirably. And Stewart explains the underlying Mormon theology with enough detail, without slowing the story, so every reader (no matter their knowledge of Mormonism) will understand.
The characters are wonderful. A crazy fundamentalist
Mormon pamphleteer, Parley and Parley’s pitiable fiancée, a mythical Native
American ushering Gabe into the climactic desert chase, and (of course) the
beautiful Mona. Quirky Mormon culture is drawn with humor and fondness, as can
be seen in this dialogue from Aunt Hattie:
“Probably…the
home teachers. They’re a real boring pair, Gabriel. The fat one gives me
lessons six times a year on the evils of drinking tea.”
While Stewart’s published novels are objective
about Utah and Mormonism, his relationship with the Mormon Church was
complicated. His study of Mormon history gave him doubts about the religion’s
divine origins. He stopped attending church services in the early-1980s. After The
Zarahemla Vision was released in 1986, Stewart received a letter from the Mormon
Church asking him to reconsider how he portrayed Mormonism in his writing. A
serious threat since the Church has never been shy about excommunicating writers
for exploring its darker places. According to Stewart’s daughter Beth, even with
his doubts about the Church’s teachings, he had always considered himself
Mormon and “it would have hurt” if he had been expelled.
Gary
L Stewart died on April 18, 2018. He spent eight days in a French hospital
after falling and breaking his leg in Charles de Gaulle Airport while returning
home from a trip to London. His sister accompanied him home to Salt Lake City,
where he had lived since retiring from ISU. He died from a pulmonary embolism
at the University of Utah hospital at the age of 81.
|
a little more about Gary Stewart…
· Diana Markham Stewart died on March 3,
2001, from complications of Multiple Sclerosis. · The names of Stewart’s two
protagonists, Gabriel Utley and Miles Utley, are combinations of family
names. Utley is a surname on his father’s side. Gabriel (of
course) was his father’s name. Miles was his mother’s maiden name. · A third Gabe Utley novel, The Cookie
Ladies, was completed but never published. · While researching The Cookie Ladies,
he wanted to see inside the Salt Lake City building where the Mormon Church’s
top-level ecclesiastical leaders had offices, but he was worried he would be
turned away because of the letter the Church had sent him after The
Zarahemla Vision was published. So, he devised a plan that included his
daughter and granddaughter. He purchased books written by two officials with
offices in the building, approached the front desk and asked if the men would
sign their books “for my granddaughter.” The secretary tapped the keys of a computer terminal, entering the false name Stewart had given, studied the screen for several seconds before
ushering them into the building. His daughter said the books were all signed,
and the men were nice, but it was creepy because the second official knew
everything that had been said in the first official’s office, as though he had
been listening in. · Richard Gere, the successful film
actor, was Gary’s student at UMASS in the late-1960s. · He was a voracious reader of classical
literature and biographies. His favorite mystery writer was Peter Abrams. · A few of his produced plays are, Whitehead
Family Reunion, Daddy’s Gone Home to Mother in Heaven, and Great
Salt Lake Festival. · His article, “Why I Can’t Write my
Joseph Smith Play” appeared in Sunstone Magazine in January 2001.
Gary Stewart’s Bibliography
Avenging
Angel (unpublished, 1980; basis for the television movie,
Avenging Angel [1995]) The
Tenth Virgin (St. Martin’s Press, 1983; Critic’s
Choice, 1988; Brash Books, 2022) The
Zarahemla Vision (St. Martin’s Press, 1986; Critic’s
Choice, 1988; Brash Books, 2022) The
Cookie Ladies (unpublished, late-1980s) Good news! Gary Stewart's two Gabe Utley novels have found life again with new editions – in both paperback and on Amazon Kindle – from Brash Books. Follow these links to Amazon (click the book titles) for The Tenth Virgin and The Zarahemla Vision. |
Sources:
Hassett,
Beth, interview, 19 Dec. 2020
King,
Susan, “Actor Picks a Movie by its Story, Not the Director,” Los Angeles
Times, 22 Jan. 1995
Stewart,
Diana Markham (obituary), Deseret News, 6 Mar. 2001
Stewart, Gary (obituary), Deseret News, 20 April 2018
Copyright © 2022 by
Ben Boulden / All Rights Reserved
______
This article is part of the Utah
Mystery Project at
Dark City Underground, which is dedicated to
discovering mainstream mystery and
crime novels
set in and around Utah’s Mormon
culture.
Leave a comment or send me an email
(zulu1611@yahoo.com)
if you know of any mainstream mystery novels
set in Utah or among Mormon culture anywhere.
Comments
Post a Comment