Gallows Thief (Reviews)

THEREBY HANGS A TALE, by David Robson
Sun 21 Oct 2001
The Sunday Telegraph

Only a very old-fashioned novelist would have dared resurrect the hoary old chestnut about the innocent man condemned to death, then reprieved at the last minute by our hero, arriving at the foot of the the scaffold on a sweat-stained horse, with a pardon in his hand. But, by the same token, only a very fine novelist could take the old chestnut and turn it into a thing of literary glory.
Page for page, sentence for sentence, scene for heart-stopping scene, Gallows Thief is the strongest historical novel I have read this year. In the Sharpe novels, Bernard Cornwell showed his quiet mastery of period and character. Here there is something else: virtuosity. Like a juggler keeping four balls in the air at once, he tells a cracking yarn and writes crisp dialogue and gets the period detail right. One can ask no more.
The opening scene is chillingly good. It is 1817. Two aldermen of the City of London are guests of honour at a quadruple hanging at Newgate prison. In the streets, excitement is building to fever pitch. One of the prisoners to be hanged is a woman, so the market for good viewing spots in the neighbouring taverns is booming. But inside the prison, it is a normal day at the office.
The governor cheerfully promises his guests devilled kidneys for breakfast. The hangman grumbles that he should have an assistant. The priest bullies the condemned men into penitence. The aldermen are pop-eyed, close to vomiting. All they can do is drink in the horror and make small-talk about the price of corn in Norwich. It is a brillant curtain-raiser, simultaneously simple and many-layered, and I can think of very few novelists who could have pulled it off with such panache.
From then on, it is hard to stop reading. At the level of whodunit, the battle to save an innocent man from the gallows, and find the real killer, the novel is mildly stimulating, no more. As a portrait of 19th-century England, moving easily between town and country, incorporating everything from smart London clubs to low taverns, from fops watching cricket matches to mentally deranged earls building models of the battlefield of Waterloo, it is masterly.