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"Hangmen and headsmen have been in the back of our minds for years," writes Howard Engel in
Lord High Executioner. "They are the bogeymen of our worst nightmares, the shape of our darkest fears." And yet what a fascinating and entertaining group of folks they actually turn out to be, at least in Engel's lively historical account of death--by hanging, drowning, burning, beheading, electrocution, and other more exotic means. Engel of course authored the famous Benny Cooperman mysteries, and for that series won the Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction in 1984. (Incidentally, Arthur Ellis, the most famous of Canadian hangmen, is one of the book's subjects.) It doesn't seem right to call this light reading, but Engel's prose is undeniably engaging, fast-paced, and never weighed down by its subject matter: "The touch of a hangman's hand was said to be a sure cure for warts, wens and other blemishes, but, as Douglas Jerrold noted in Punch, hanging was supposed to cure murder, and that didn't work either." Even for an opponent of capital punishment like Engel, there is something inherently, if perversely, compelling about this subject matter. Consider the "death of a thousand cuts," say, where the condemned is dismembered with knives labelled with different body parts and drawn at random from a basket, or a punishment for adultery that required a woman to be "sown into a sack in company with an ape, a poisonous snake, a dog, and a cockerel, and flung into a pool to drown." The author has obviously done a lot of research, but this is not a scholarly book: Engel describes it as "literary and curious." For those who find themselves still morbidly captivated after reading
Lord High Executioner, a bibliography has been included.
--Russell Prather
From Library Journal
Engel, an award-winning mystery writer, has written a scholarly history of executions and executioners, with an emphasis on England and the Commonwealth countries. Notable beheaders' and hangmen's lives are presented with their thoughts and beliefs on how executions should be carried out. Engel briefly discusses capital punishment in Europe and the United States. In so far as he states that he is in favor of abolishing executions but has attempted to be unbiased, he fails. In his discussion of the death penalty in the United States, he uses cases that were causes celebres among opponents of the death penalty: Barbara Graham, Caryl Chessman, Ted Bundy, etc. Nevertheless, academic libraries should consider this title because it contains material that is rarely covered: capital punishment in Canada and women who have been sentenced to death. Unlike Engel, Farrington, a writer and ex-Fleet Street journalist who worked for several years at London's Central Criminal Court, has written a concise survey of "justice" through the ages. The punishments and tortures discussed, seen as barbaric today, were once considered appropriate for the particular time. Heavily illustrated, this book is not for those with a weak stomach. The major drawback is the use of red pages with black words and black pages with white words, which makes the text difficult to read. In addition, there is no bibliography. Despite these flaws, this is a good purchase for popular true crime and history collections.?Michael Sawyer, Clinton P.L., Ia.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
