The Master Executioner
Estleman, who has written many thrillers, here writes of the post-Civil War years of the American West. However, this is not a “western” in any traditional sense.
Oscar Stone, a young, Union veteran from Ohio and a carpenter by trade, arrives in Kansas with his new bride. By chance, Oscar meets the alcoholic Rudd, the official hangman at Fort Leavenworth, who gives Oscar an opportunity to work as a carpenter building a gallows. But Rudd, drunk or no, is not just a hangman–a brutish “strangler,” as he scornfully describes his rivals–but a careful technician, a craftsman of the well-oiled hemp and the precisely calculated final drop. Rudd recognizes in young Oscar a fellow craftsman, and he is right. Taking up this dark trade costs Stone his wife, separates him from normal society, and makes him a wealthy man. Rudd is Oscar’s only real friend, though from time to time the wife reappears, to tell Stone once again why she could never live with him or love him. In the end, three decades on, the brash new electric chair is to replace hanging in much of the now progressive and “civilized” West, and the reader can perhaps guess how Oscar Stone, the Master Executioner, will end his deadly career as a perfectionist in “suspension.”
Estleman, who has always been prepared to sacrifice an agitated plot for atmosphere and deeper depiction of character, has written a disturbing, hypnotic, and oddly, a nearly plotless book. Is there a touch of Adolf Eichmann in Stone (who has German ancestry) – showing a perfect, emotionless, technical and adept servant of a killing government? This may be going too far, but in Oscar Stone, Estleman, with very few anachronistic lapses, has created a character who escapes from his time and inveigles himself very coolly into ours. Not a comfortable book, this, and much more threatening than many where the blood-bolstered violence is right on-stage rather than, mainly, off.
