McGinnis Nine-Nine: “Shoot an Arrow to Stop the Wind”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



Shoot an Arrow to Stop the Wind, by Colin Stuart
(Popular Library, 1971).

With any luck, there will be no further works in this Killer Covers series that find me so utterly lacking in knowledge of their authors as this one does. Colin Stuart penned at least two novels, Shoot an Arrow to Stop the Wind (published originally in 1970 by Dial Press) and Walks Far Woman (which came out in 1976 from Doubleday). That’s pretty much all I know for certain about him. There’s another Colin Stuart who is an astronomy author and speaker, but judging from photos of him, he is far too young to have produced this paperback novel 54 years ago.

Fortunately, I can tell you a little bit about Shoot an Arrow’s plot. A February 1970 review in The New York Times called it

A gentle, unforced, lovely book. A novel that reads like a memoir, it is a record of a boy’s idyllic summer in northern Montana, near the Canadian border. The time is 1926, the boy is 16 and the whole world’s young. He is part, a very small part, Blackfoot Indian, but living with his “breed” family, the Indian side of him dominates the white. The boy learns a lot about white attitudes, Indian attitudes and mixed attitudes. He also learns a great deal of lore not found in books, mostly through his full‐blooded Indian great‐grand mother, a magic‐maker of prodigious proportions. He falls in love twice and discovers that life can become too complicated to explain.

Farm labor in the summer is a muscle wearying, energy‐draining enterprise, and Mr. Stuart doesn’t sweeten it up for us. On the other hand, he does let us share some of the compensations: a cold swim in the stream, the fresh summer‐grown food, the continual contact with the outdoors, the peace and harmony of a united effort in a productive cause. Modest in attitude, relaxed in the telling, the book is serious without being portentous, humorous without exaggeration, authentic without striving to be exotic. Only someone whose horizons are bounded by the Manhattan skyline would fail to enjoy it.

But about this novel’s author? Well, he is shrouded in mystery. His identity is made all the more confounding by the fact that credit for writing Walks Far Woman—which served as the basis for a 1982 Raquel Welch TV flick—is given by Amazon to both Colin Stuart and one Clark Spurlock. For a while, I toyed with the notion that “Colin Stuart” was a nom de plume for Spurlock, the latter of whom was responsible for a 1955 study of how the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt with various education issues. Their initials—“C.S.”—are the same, so … maybe? In the end, however, I decided that Amazon is simply mistaken. Other online sources make no mention of Spurlock having had anything to do with Walks Far Woman, and the copyright page of that novel’s 1978 Popular Library paperback edition lists only Stuart as its author.

Finally, I dug up a not-wholly-favorable critique of Walks Far Woman, published in the Autumn 1977 issue of American Indian Quarterly, that describes Dr. Colin Stuart as “a retired history professor.” Sadly, no mention is made of where he taught. Another dead end.