After many agreeable books of fiction, Howard Engel (known as "Howie" to co-workers and friends) has written an agreeable book of non-fiction. The subject, as evident from the title, is the people who put other people to death. The non-polemical way in which Engel discusses his subject does not detract from his essential humanity; his book may be "deliciously macabre", as his publisher's blurb suggests, but it is also one of genuine aversion.
Perhaps it was just a matter of time before Howie & the Hangmen made its appearance. Engel has long been fascinated by the gibbet, as I recall from conversations about the death penalty in the old CBC radio studio "G", where we put on the series The Scales of Justice. Engel was opposed to capital punishment, as was the program's host, the criminal lawyer Eddie Greenspan, who provided the foreword for Engel's grimly delightful opus.
My own feelings about the hangman were more ambivalent. For instance, I like my peace and quiet, so I could see merit in the ancient Egyptians making the ultimate penalty available for creating "disturbances in the City at night."
This factoid comes from Engel's book, needless to say, along with other arcane bits about what a person could be hanged, crucified, or beheaded for in various times and places. After a while the reader cannot resist matching the curio shop of his own mind against the author's (at least I couldn't) and come up with capital crimes that Engel has failed to list-such as "consorting with gypsies", for instance, a hanging offence in England until the early nineteenth century.
Lord High Executioner (from W. S. Gilbert, of course) describes the ingenious ways people have invented for each other's demise. In addition to such favourites as garrotting and the guillotine, it includes burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel. The only one missing from the list is impalement, the technique for which Vlad the Impaler, better known as Dracula, became noted.
The main features of Engel's nostalgic look at the gallows are mini-biographies of well-remembered practitioners of the art. They range from the archetype, Jack Ketch, to Canada's own Arthur Ellis, and includes an evaluation of their craftsmanship. Engel is an exacting judge, and he gives the nod for skilfulness to the British hangmen James Berry and John Ellis. He thinks less of the famous William Calcraft (he calls him a bungler, which may be a trifle harsh) or of John C. Woods, the American master sergeant who executed several Nazi war criminals after the Nuremberg trials.
Engel also provides biographical sketches of those at the other end of the rope. In his book half, or more than half, are women. Women, of course, have never been put to death as often as men-partly because women commit fewer capital crimes and partly because most societies have been somewhat reluctant to execute them-but in Engel's account they get equal, if not preferential, treatment.
A chronicler may have three motives for giving equal treatment to women on the gallows: (a) a modish author may do it as a form of affirmative action, (b) an opponent of the death penalty may do it to boost his argument, and (c) a writer may dwell on the subject because he finds it pleasant. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that Engel did it for the last reason, of course.
The only error I noticed in the book is in a photograph depicting the garrotting of a Nazi war criminal. The execution of this man, Szalasi by name, did not take place in a public square as the caption suggests, but in the courtyard of Budapest's Marko Street prison. I know because I happened to be there.
At one point Engel's egalitarian sensibilities lead him astray. He contrasts the outcry elicited by the execution of Dr. Dodd-a popular eighteenth-century pamphleteer for whom Samuel Johnson had sought a royal reprieve-with the lack of protest against the hanging of a fifteen-year-old stage-coach robber who ended up on the same gallows with Dr. Dodd. I cannot share Engel's disapproval. If, God forbid, he were to be sentenced to hanging, I'd promptly sign a petition to seek reprieve for him, without feeling obliged to do so for a young mugger.
Engel, one of the few literate people the CBC has ever employed, probably by mistake, went on to a fruitful literary career after the Corporation discovered its error and downsized him in the mid-1980s. His Benny Cooperman series of mysteries has delighted thousands of readers. Now Lord High Executioner provides further proof that letting Engel go may have been one of the CBC's most lasting contributions to Canadian letters.

 George Jonas is a motorcyclist, columnist, poet, TV and radio producer, and librettist.