BOOK REVIEW: Hangman’s Dozen by William E Wallace

It’s hard to give a general review of a book made up of thirteen separate stories, especially when there were some I loved, some I hated, and some that I forgot five minutes after reading.

Hangman’s Dozen, published by All Due Respect, promised a collection of lurid tales. Each short story focuses on at least one, but usually a few, unsavoury characters, ranging from jewellery store robbers to smack-heads, dealers to drunken dentists and much that falls in between.

The opening chapter Superstitious (spelled correctly on the contents page, but not at the head of the chapter) involves three crooks who have plans to raid a jewellery store. The leader waits outside while his colleagues do all the work. Plans go awry and the two goons end up killing the store manager and the security guard. The leader is most unhappy, and kills them both, though I wasn’t quite sure whether or not this was always part of his plan.

Had this story not been called “Superstitious”, maybe I wouldn’t have guessed the ending. The two robbers had been annoying the leader with their various, almost competitive stories of superstitions and rituals, so with that it mind it seemed impossible that this tale would not end with karma stepping in to finish it.

While the leader drives onto the freeway, now with three times his expected cut from the robbery (perhaps, or maybe not, depending on his unclear earlier motives), he is taken out in a vehicle collision. One sentence stood out from the rest in this story for me – “The 18 wheeler flattened the Civic like a beer can, turning the shot caller into purée, and scattering stolen gems along two miles of freeway.” I want to say I loved this sentence, but the truth is – I don’t. It’s just the most descriptive part of the story, and just for that I like it.

On finishing this first chapter, my initial thoughts were that it was okay, a little predictable, and could have had a bit more descriptive detail, but not too bad. Just not the lurid tale I was anticipating. I just hoped the rest of the stories had more guts.

The next short story, “459” wouldn’t even have registered enough in my memory to comment had I not made notes immediately after reading it – my first note being “what the actual f?”

So it goes like this. Smack-head breaks into a house. He steals jewellery and a gun. Home-owner comes back. Smack-head shoots him dead and then goes off to score.

In my opinion this isn’t a story, it’s just an occurrence. It was like a snapshot taken from a much bigger picture, but without being seen in context, it means too little for me to care about. The smack-head is, of course, a scumbag by most people’s standards, and the home owner was a seemingly innocent guy, but in a story well padded out over just five pages there wasn’t time for me to invest enough in the characters to give a damn.

There is some description of George Adams, the smack-head, but nothing I didn’t feel like I’d read many times before.

Story number three, “Bird Hunter” did have the satisfying element of raw justice that I’d been hoping for, when the father of a girl who had died from an overdose kills her dealer with his own gun.  Again though, the length of the story (just over three pages) was not enough for me to really despise the dealer, as much as I’m sure I should have.

Sadly, the fourth story, “Blackout” was still no improvement. A probably arrogant (I say ‘probably’ because, again, not much description of his character outside of his actions) dentist wakes up with a hangover and discovers that while drunk, he ran a girl over and killed her, and now faces prison if caught. The end.

No twist. No karma coming to bite him in the arse. No family member exacting a gruesome revenge. Nothing.

At this point, had I not been reviewing this book, I would have probably given up.

Then story five “The Bust’Out” comes along and blows me out of the water! I loved this! A story, an actual story, complete with beginning, middle and end! This is the tale of a group of bumbling idiots who make a gargantuan cock-up of an jewellery store robbery/arson/insurance job. The job has been planned down to almost the finest detail, they think, but they fail to take into account one tiny element – the weight capacity of the elevator.

Set over twenty or so pages, this story had enough for me to really get my teeth into, and had enough space to create a story, rather than just an event.

So onto the sixth….the first thing that bugged me here was the name of the main character “Art”. Not that Art isn’t a good name, but there was an “Art” in The Bust-Out. I had to go back and check that this wasn’t a sequel. Were there no other names that could have been used here?

I won’t dwell on it.

This ‘story’ is a conversation between a federal agent and a snitch. There’s really nothing more I can add.

“Incident on Car 412” was definitely more up my street. There was much more description given here to the colourful array of characters in a train car. This felt much more real, like a true picture of what we may see every single day, but often don’t notice.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here, for fear of spoiling the twist, but this is a story of a seemingly unlikely team, working together. It was not what I expected, and I loved it.

“Max B” was one of my favourite stories in this collection. This follows a break-out from a maximum security prison. The prisoner at the centre of the story is believable, and terrifying. He is absolutely without any kind of feeling or remorse, his initial act involving repeated slamming of a door on a prison officer’s head, leaving what is described as a “…bloody mass of bone shards sticking up through curds of gray”.

Again, this is a story which has a satisfying (maybe not if it was a true story!) ending, which finished it beautifully.

My only gripe here was a random sentence “That was all she wrote for Cespedes” which has absolutely no place here! I had to re-read a couple of times, wondering who ‘she’ was, and what ‘she’ was writing, before coming to the conclusion that this must have been an editorial error.

“Recovery Man” Eddie Pax is the bad guy in the next story, and the tale takes the form of a pillow talk conversation between him and Kathleen, a girl he picked up in a bar. While describing carefully what he does for a living, he mentally recalls a recent job, where he ‘recovered’ an auto body shop from it’s owner, following some torture and a pretty grisly ending for the other guy.

This story was descriptive, and definitely held my interest, but again I felt like it was just a recollection of a very short (albeit gruesome) series of events.

“Stand By Your Man” starts with Ike Stanton being beaten for banging another man’s woman. This story focuses on the woman as the villain, playing one man off against the other, and enjoying doing so. There is some suggestion that she may have had some ulterior motive, but unfortunately that is never revealed – maybe I read something into it that wasn’t there.

Couple of weird things in this one. Another random sentence shows up. “”Afterward it was Katy bar the door” is in the middle of a sex scene. I have no idea what it means, so can only guess that it was another editorial fail.

Back to that sex scene though. Ewww, uncomfortable reading. Not because there was anything ‘unusual’ about the sex, but just because it read like it had been written by a 14 year old boy who had maybe stumbled across some cheesy porn in his parents bedroom. “Baby, baby, baby! You turn me on soooooo much!” Really? Who says that?

The other thing that confused me here was when “she ran her tongue half way down his throat to his liver when they kissed goodbye…”. I was never great at biology, but I’m pretty sure your liver is definitely not that close to, let alone half way down, your throat! What does that even mean?

“The Custodian” tells of a two-bit lawyer, who finds himself the custodian of over two million dollars from a robbery, of which only fifty grand is on record. Anyone connected with the robbery is dead, leaving him free to leave the country and live a life of luxury….until Eddie Pax the ‘Recovery Man’ shows up…

On my notes I gave this story 7/10. It was interesting, though a little padded with what I felt was unnecessary dialogue in the court house, but overall I thought it was a good read – the re-appearance of Eddie Pax was a great twist. I thought it would have been great if more of these stories could have been loosely intertwined in some way.

“The Double Iron Cross” was probably my favourite. A recently released ex-con tries to rip of a not-so-bright neo-nazi gang member. Again, I don’t want to give too much away, as I’d really recommend reading this one. What I enjoyed most about this was the dilemma the guy is left with at the end; the only way to help himself is to drop himself even deeper in it. That’s all I’m saying.

And onto the finale, “Ladies Man”.

Louise Henley is in a bar watching a couple getting drunk and flirting outrageously. He’s horny and has plans of his own for the woman. Not what I expected, but all three characters here were well written, with some backstory to the main protagonist. This was one of the stories in this collection that I felt had the most definition to it.

I wish this story had been somewhere in the middle of the book. For me, the penultimate story would have left me intrigued, and maybe wanting to read more work by this author. That’s not to say that this chapter wasn’t good – it was.

Overall, it’s very hard to rate this book. The stories with substance were good, with detail that can only have come from detailed research, and a great deal of effort.

It’s hard to believe that they’re written by the same author that wrote five pages of drivel in “459”.

I love short stories in general, but for me they still need to have a beginning, middle and end.. This can be written, implied, or even an ending with an unanswered question that makes me think about it enough to draw my own conclusions. But for sure, it needs to be a full picture, one way or another. Sadly, not enough of these stories packed the powerful punch I’d hoped for.

Some of the short stories in this collection feel just like random chapters plucked from other novels – gritty un-put-downable novels, but without context they’re nothing more than a basic ingredient. I love cake…but wouldn’t dream of eating any of the ingredients on their own. They need to be combined, baked, and eaten in the context that they should be – cake! At times reading this book was like eating four ounces of flour, followed by two raw eggs, then some sugar which is slightly more palatable, but is then followed up by four ounces of butter.

Had the stories been longer, just long enough so I could really understand the characters and their motivations, be they good or bad, I would have felt like my time had been well invested in this book. As it is, some stories left me thinking ‘and then what?’