Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me
| Save the Last Dance for Me | |
| Sam McCain [4] | |
| Ed Gorman | |
| (2001) | |
| Rating: | **** |
| Tags: | Mystery |
### From Publishers Weekly
Shamus-winner Gorman's fourth nostalgia-ridden Sam McCain novel (after The Day the Music Died), set in Black River Falls, Iowa (pop. 27,300), during the summer of 1960, has to rank as one of the more good-natured mysteries in memory. His wouldn't-hurt-a-fly but much abused hero, a part-time lawyer and part-time PI, gets hired by the town judge to investigate the murder of John Muldaur, a local fundamentalist preacher who used live rattlesnakes to test the "purity" of his flock, after someone doses the preacher's bottle of Pepsi with strychnine. When he wasn't sleeping with the wife of one of his congregation, Muldaur was conducting a vigorous campaign to expose the conspiracy of Zionists and Roman Catholics to take over the world. Gorman has a lot of fun at the expense of his half-witted bigots. McCain's orders are to find Muldaur's killer before the arrival of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who's on a campaign tour and due to deliver a speech in Black River Falls. A stupid sheriff and the fanatical hillbillies who revere Muldaur's name don't make McCain's task any easier. Gorman delivers an intelligent and plausible solution to the crime, while the killer proves to be an unexpected but logical choice good for a goose bump or two. If the book's a bit thin on substance, it's a fast read with the best cast of comical country characters this side of Dogpatch.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
### From Booklist
Richard Nixon is running for president, and one of his campaign stops will be Black River Falls, Iowa. The only reason the visit is of any concern at all to young attorney Sam McCain--whose personal politics register considerably to the left of the vice president's--is that the county's leading Republican is Judge Esme Ann Whitney, who is also Sam's boss and sole source of income in his part-time capacity as an investigator. When John Muldaur, a snake-handling preacher dies of poisoning, Judge Whitney directs Sam to investigate, determined that the case be solved by the time Nixon and the national media hit town. When another local preacher is also murdered, Sam's hopes of a quick resolution dissipate. The fourth McCain mystery is another dead-on perfect journey to the underside of the late '50s and early '60s, exposing the anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism that lurked beneath the era's placid surface. Another strong entry in a thoroughly enjoyable series. *Wes Lukowsky*
*Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*
Save The Last Dance For Me
by Ed Gorman
Volume I of Two Volumes
Pages i-Xii and 1-168
Published by:
Carroll and Graf Publishers
An Imprint of
Avalon Publishing Group Inc.
161 William St., 16th Floor
New York, Ny 10038.
Further reproduction or distribution in other than a specialized
format is prohibited.
Produced in braille for the Library of Congress, National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, by National Braille
Press Inc., 2003.
This braille edition contains the
entire text of the print edition.
Copyright 2002 by Ed Gorman
Book Jacket Information iii
A Sam McCain Mystery
Praise For Ed Gorman’s
Sam McCain Mystery Series
“Sweetly nostalgic mystery. …
[McCain’s] zeal to cleanse Black River Falls of evil makes him the kind of hero any small town could take to its heart.”
—Marilyn Stasio, New York
Times Book Review
“Gorman’s delightful series …
provoke[s] a bracing nostalgia for a time that was neither as innocent nor as dull as is sometimes said.”—.Wall Street Journal
“Gorman’s successful capturing of time and place … sharply evokes the twilight of the ‘ej’s.”—.Los Angeles Times
“No writer captures the mood of 1950’s middle America … better than Gorman.”
—..Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“Gorman seems to have hit a mother lode with this series.”—.Publishers Weekly
“In Black River Falls … good and
evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as they have in the more urban crime drama of Block or Leonard.”—.Booklist
Murder strikes a poisonous note in
1950’s Iowa as the acclaimed Sam McCain mystery series continues.
It is August 1960, and Vice
President Richard Milhous Nixon is
riding the campaign trail. Among his next stops is Black River Falls, Iowa—a prospect that has the whole town talking and Judge Esme Anne Whitney, the
presidential candidate’s old friend, bustling with Republican fervor. Out on the north edge of town, meanwhile, in the abandoned garage where the country preacher John Muldaur has set up his ministry, the snakes are rattling. Very Muldaur has not endeared himself to the people of Black River Falls either with his snake-handling ceremonies or with the anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic pamphlets—The Jews
Behind John F. Kennedy screams their headline—t he’s been circulating. Still, the town’s youngest lawyer and sometime private investigator, Sam McCain, finds
Muldaur’s claim that he may be the target of a papist assassination plot largely improbable.
McCain can’t deny, though, that somebody has got it in bad for Muldaur when, apparently by snakebite but actually from strychnine-laced Pepsi, the preacher drops dead at his own altar.
With Nixon’s visit only a week away Judge Whitney wants this inconvenient matter of murder cleared up fast, to keep the entire population of Black River Falls from looking like “a bunch of hill people” to the Gop and the national press. Between McCain and the solution stand a heap of local prejudices, some unpleasant family secrets, the dim-witted police chief Cliffie Sykes, Jr., another
corpse, and a cageful of rattlesnakes.
Ed Gorman, winner of the Shamus, the Spur, and the International Fiction Writer’s Award among others, is the author of many novels, including Cold Blue Midnight and Senatorial Privilege. He has
written three other mysteries in the Sam McCain series—..The Day the Music
Died, Wake Up Little Susie, and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?—and is the editor of Mystery Scene magazine. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Jacket design by Susan Shapiro,
adapted from original series
design by Saksa Art and Design
Jacket photographs:
The Drifters; Frank Driggs
Collection/getty Images all other
photos Hulton/archivest Getty Images
Author photograph: Vii
Amy Kinney
Also by Ed Gorman
The Sam McCain Series
The Day the Music Died; Wake Up Little Susie; Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
The Jack Dwyer Series
New, Improved Murder; Murder
Straight Up; Murder in the Wings; The Autumn Dead; A Cry of Shadows
The Tobin Series
Murder on the Aisle; Several Deaths Later
The Robert Payne Series
Blood Moon; Hawk Moon; Harlot’s
Moon
Suspense Novels
The Night Remembers; The First Lady; Runner in the Dark; Senatorial Privilege Short Story Collections
Prisoners; Dark Whispers; Moonchasers
All of the characters in this book are ix fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.
For Joe and Mitsue Gorman
and the grandkids
Shannon, P.J., and Regan
and For Sadao, Norika, and
Hisami Sugiyama
with great love, affection, and joy
I have drawn extensively from Richard Xi Hofstadter’s fine book
Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life.
—E.G.
“It was not until I was 8 years old that I discovered that not all the world was Roman Catholic.
When John F. Kennedy ran for president, it became clear that many Americans outside our homogeneous enclave considered our faith strange and suspicious and threatening. It turned out we were a they.”
—Anna Quindlen
Save The Last Dance
For Me
“You hear them, McCain?”
“Oh, I hear them all right.”
And I did. How could you not hear them?
“So you know what they are?” she said.
“You bet I do,” I said.
“And you’re not scared?”
“Who said I wasn’t scared?”
“You did. On the way over.”
“Oh.”
“So you are scared?” she said.
“A little, I guess.”
“I’m scared. But then I’m a girl. I’m not a big brave five-foot-four he-man like you.”
“Five-five.”
“Yeah, in motorcycle boots maybe.”
“In motorcycle boots I’d be
five-six. If I owned a pair.”
“Have I ever told you I’m
five-foot-seven?”
“Not more than 4eagcb times,” I said.
“Almost five-eight, actually.”
“All right, I’m scared. Does that make you feel better?”
She gave me her best kid-sister grin and squeezed my hand. It was a kid-sister squeeze, too. Nothing romantic.
“Actually, that does make me feel better, McCain. So let’s go in, all right?”
Just as we walked away from my ‘ea red Ford ragtop, she stopped me and said. “Actually, maybe we’re imagining it.”
“Imagining what?”
“You know. Hearing the rattlesnakes. I don’t think you can hear rattlesnakes this far away.”
“You want to get out a tape measure?”
The grin again. It always made me want to kiss her. But she was married and we were both reasonably honorable people. So I knew better than to try and she knew better than to let me should I be foolish enough to try.
I guess I should do a little scene-setting here.
The date is August 19, 1960.
The town is Black River Falls, Iowa, pop. 20eacjj. The pretty, red-haired young woman I’m with is Kylie Burke, ace reporter for The Black River Falls
Clarion. Only reporter, actually. She isn’t writing the story—her boss is doing that—but she thought it’d look good on her resume (in case the New York Times calls
someday) to say she did background on a group of Ozark folks who moved here after getting kicked out of every state contiguous to ours. Seems these folk incorporate rattlesnakes in their services and that is a violation of the law. And after all the rain we had this past spring, there are plenty of timber rattlers to be had in the woods.
Kylie’s a bit uneasy about visiting these folks, as am I, so we’re here together.
My name is Sam McCain. I’m the youngest and poorest attorney in town. I’m also an investigator for Judge Esme Anne
Whitney, the handsome, middle-aged woman who presides over district court. At the age of twenty-four, I earn more from Judge Whitney than I do from my law practice. I’m here tonight because I was summoned by Reverend John Muldaur, the hill-country man who procures the rattlers and oversees the services.
The place we’re about to enter is a deserted four-bay service garage that was once part of a Chevrolet dealership on the north edge of town.
It’s closed up tight except two of the front windows have been smashed and are now filled only with cardboard, so you can hear everything going on. A tornado came through here in ‘ed and killed eight of us, including a two-month-old, and wiped out everything in this area, including the gleaming new Chevrolet showroom, except the garage. The dealer decided to rebuild on the opposite end of town, apparently figuring his luck might be better come the next tornado.
The cars and panel trucks and pickup trucks parked in the melancholy twilight looked as if they’d been driven across a time warp from the Dust Bowl. Hadn’t been washed in years.
Had smashed windshields. Cracked headlights.
Missing taillights. Tires that held varying amounts of air, some of them nearly flat. were rusted out so badly the rust had turned into holes in places. And were covered with stickers of
all sizes and all lurid colors exhorting pagans to hand themselves over to God and be damned quick about it before it was too late.
The service was just now starting. An Old Testament voice said into a screeching microphone, “Let us now praise the Lord in song.”
And that’s when we knew that we really had been hearing rattlesnakes. Because as a lone, lame electric guitar began to play “I Know The Bible’s Right—Somebody’s Wrong” the faint rattling sound disappeared.
The man appeared from inside the small door in the face of the whitewashed concrete-block building. He was big and wide in his greasy gray work clothes. The dour line of his mouth exploded into a smile as he said, “The Lord welcomes you.” But the close, hard way he looked at us made me wonder about his words.