THE MASTER EXECUTIONER

Thirty years in the life of a master craftsman—a hangman—from his first hanging to his displacement by the infamous electric chair.

Estleman’s prose snaps like fresh linen Treasury bills, using a Cold-Eye-of-God style for a type of fiction-truer-than-fact stretching back to Defoe’s true-fact novel Journal of the Plague Year. Is Oscar Stone, the most famed hangman in the States, satisfied to bring a rapist or murderer to his just reward? “No. I am not a follower of the Old Testament. Whatever his deed, no man deserves to choke to death slowly or have his head torn from his shoulders like a chicken. I am a simple craftsman, like the fellow who built this scaffold. The sweetest sound to me is the clean sharp crack of a neck breaking precisely at the second cervical vertebra.” Moving from hanging to hanging throughout the West, Oscar carries his many tools with him, including lissome, silken ropes of Indian hemp oiled to a golden saffron, with knots that slip perfectly into the hollow under the left ear for a loud clean break. We follow Oscar as a runaway youth riding with the Yankees to his training as a cabinet- (and coffin-) maker to his courtship of Gretchen Smollet. He apprentices as a hangman to Rudd, a tippler who has sewn up all the hangings in the Kansas area. Later, when she can’t bear his work, Gretchen flees and he spends much of the story looking for her. Eventually, he finds that he may or may not have fathered a son with her, and that he may unwittingly have hung him as a murderer—this in the later days, before he’s down to two hangings a year and ready to retire on his investments.

Two years ago, Estleman completed his Detroit quintet with Thunder City, a series that deserves reprint in a single volume that can rest somewhere between Dreiser and Norris.