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Summary
Summary
Few people understand Oscar Stone. He's more bloodless than bloodthirsty. He is a student of his art, completely versed in its centuries-old traditions. For more than 25 years Oscar has worked to create his reputation of master executioner, yet he is utterly alone. One day, when a piece of his past catches him unaware, Oscar comes to a moment of devastating truth and, for the first time, he knows himself. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Author Notes
Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 15, 1952. He received a B.A. in English literature and journalism from Eastern Michigan University in 1974. He spent several years as a reporter on the police beat before leaving to write full time in 1980. He wrote book reviews for such newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post and contributed articles to such periodicals as TV Guide.
He is a writer of mysteries and westerns. His first novel was published in 1976 and since then he has published more than 70 books including the Amos Walker series, Writing the Popular Novel, Roy and Lillie: A Love Story, The Confessions of Al Capone, and a The Branch and the Scaffold. He received four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Golden Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from Western Writers of America, and the Michigan Author's Award in 1997.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This superbly crafted novel of the American West not only outshines any of Estleman's 12 previous novels (Billy Gashade, etc.) with Forge, it also stands far above considerably weaker efforts currently being cranked out by many who still labor in this fading genre. Oscar Stone goes from being a carpenter to a hangman, "a master executioner" who heard his calling by accident but once his talent is discovered, he embraces it to the exclusion of everything else, including his wife or any hope of an ordinary life. Fabian T. Rudd, a veteran executioner and frontier philosopher (and one of the most wonderfully original characters to come out of a western novel in years), tutors Stone in the finer points of death by hanging. The apprentice takes his lessons well beyond the fundamentals and elevates his profession from a mere vocation to a veritable art. He achieves personal (albeit dubious) celebrity as a result, but the darkness of his trade haunts the young man as he traverses the American West, dispensing the final act of justice, applying and always improving his expertise to guarantee an efficient and humane dispatch to some of the worst villains of the frontier. Eventually, Stone must come to terms with who he is and what he does. He tries to understand that to do a thing well and with respect is the greatest goal of human endeavor, no matter how grisly the particulars may be or how lonely he may become as a result. This excellent novel is well researched and effectively and unsentimentally delivered, with only the occasional anachronism marring a nearly perfect and historically accurate dramatization of the American West and the colorful people who built it. Print advertising in Western publications. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Thirty years in the life of a master craftsmana hangmanfrom his first hanging to his displacement by the infamous electric chair. Estlemans 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 Defoes 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 cant 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 murdererthis in the later days, before hes 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.
Booklist Review
Oscar Stone accepts a temporary position building a gallows in Topeka, Kansas, where he meets Fabian Timothy Rudd, a hangman of some repute. Rudd is impressed with Stone's carpentry skills and pride in his work and so takes on the role of mentor as Stone becomes a kind of apprentice hangman. But no one loves a hangman, including his wife, who can't live with her young husband's career choice. Stone travels through the West with Rudd from execution to execution, drinking to dull the isolation and refining his skills. Miscalculations can lead to strangulation or worse: a beheading. Decades pass, and Stone has a final meeting with the wife who left him and learns a terrible truth. Estleman has created an unforgettable character in Stone. Swept up by circumstance and an unwanted gift for dispensing death, he's unable to break away from his life's fated path despite the loss of all he holds close. A dark, compelling journey into a previously unexplored facet of the Old West. --Wes Lukowsky