Two executions behind the forbidding walls of Oakala prison near Vancouver in the mid-1950s. The first a routine hanging. The second a gruesome spectacle. The executions indirectly link two reporters who are also bound by their strong feelings for the same 23-year-old woman, Jenny.
After watching the grisly execution, the older reporter, Bill, who is married to Jenny, descends into a swirl of irrational behaviour, self-loathing over past indiscretions and alcohol even though he knows drink can bring out a mean streak in him. Jenny feels increasingly frustrated in her marriage to Bill and does little to hide it. One evening he assaults her in a drunken fury, throwing her into the arms of the much younger reporter, Peter, who covered the first hanging.
Jenny, who emerges as the strongest character of the three, finds fulfilment for the first time with Peter but their idyll is short-lived. The scandal triggered by their fierce lovemaking soon compels Peter to leave Vancouver for a job in England, cutting his ties to Jenny and to his past in Canada.
The cast of characters includes Camille Blanchard, Canada’s official executioner, a dark presence throughout the book. The novel offers a first-ever physical description of Blanchard. At the time, such a portrayal – like any revelation of his true identity and where he lived – was banned under the Official Secrets Act.
The story is recounted by JAC Lewis, the pseudonym of a retired newsman who is almost certainly the last living Canadian journalist to have covered a hanging in Canada.
British Columbia put a halt to executions in 1959. Ottawa effectively banned the death penalty in 1962 and formally abolished it in 1976.
J.A.C. Lewis is also the author of The Tooth, a young war reporter’s account of the last terrible weeks of the Algerian War on the streets of Algiers.