Books, Arts & Manners: Rustic Chivalry

Of Murder and Madness, by Gerry Spence (Doubleday, 463 pp., $17.95)

Gerry Spence is a criminal lawyer in Wyoming, famous in his home State and believed by some to be the finest trial lawyer in America. He is certainly enormously effective if the case described so vividly in this book is any measure. That he tells it himself in terms of his kaleidoscopic personality makes it all the more powerful. Cross-hatched with Western folk experience, the book becomes in the end aerobic reading.