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'The Last Dance' by Ed McBain

No. 50 for the 87th: Rights to a play hang in the balance

Sunday, January 02, 2000

By Robert Croan, Post-Gazette Senior Editor

	The Last Dance By Ed McBain Simon & Schuster $25.00

This is the 50th installment in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, and it’s as fresh and vivid and original as if the concept were entirely new.

For those who may not be familiar with entries 1 through 49, the 87th exists in an imaginary city that is just like New York in every way except for the names of the streets and the fact that its mayor has not yet decided to run for higher office.

The policemen in the precinct are good and bad. The best of them -- in effect, the hero of this series -- is Frank Carella, an all-round good guy who goes home to a very functional, loving family of two children and a deaf wife. There are some bad cops, too, including the fat, gluttonous, bigoted, politically incorrect Oliver Wendell Weeks. Another cop gives away a female witness he had sworn to protect.

McBain’s writing pulls the reader in from the first page.

“ ‘He had heart trouble,’ the woman was telling Carella. Which perhaps accounted for the tiny pinpricks of blood on the dead man’s eyeballs. … Here he was. On a fishing expedition with a woman he felt was lying.”

The woman in question is the dead man’s daughter, and while she would have it believed that he died of natural causes, it soon becomes clear that the victim was hanged (with the rope from his bathrobe) and then moved to a bed.

Before long, it also comes out that the old man owned rights to a long-forgotten play that is about to be made into a musical, and that he was the last holdout in selling those rights to the producer.

A slew of theatrical professionals and wannabes -- including the daughter -- have a large stake in getting those rights, which now go to the daughter.

And there’s another twist: The dead man had first been sedated with a designer drug known as Rope -- a popular instrument for making date rape easier -- and Rope has also been used in one or two other murders in the area, which may or may not be related.

As the plot thickens, it brings together such unlikely bedfellows as a bisexual Jamaican assassin; a crooked minister; a mink-clad, chain-smoking producer; a tough-talking hooker; plus a lot of unethical lawyers trying to protect the guilty.

The plot is as compelling as McBain’s terse, vivid prose. There are too many strands to be enumerated, but they fit together convincingly. Small details make the fictional city and its inhabitants amazingly real.

Good doesn’t always prevail, but one detective -- shot in the thigh during a sting operation -- manages to find happiness with his physician-love in an interracial relationship that seems doomed in the unfair world in which they live.