A Dance at the Slaughterhouse
by Lawrence Block
Summary
Matthew Scudder, unlicensed investigator, recovering alcoholic, keeper of his own strange tithes, is hired by a dead woman's brother: Amanda Thurman, pregnant, wealthy, was raped and murdered in her apartment while her husband Richard, a cable sports producer, was tied up and beaten by the intruders, and the brother believes, on no evidence the police will credit, that Richard staged all of it. Scudder starts circling the widower, and the case crosses, by the kind of accident Block engineers like fate, with something worse: at a boxing arena, watching Thurman work, Scudder recognises a man he has seen before, on a videotape a friend found sleeved inside a rented copy of The Dirty Dozen, a tape on which two masked figures torture and kill a boy, not in special effects.
The novel braids the society murder and the snuff economy into one descent, Scudder tracking the tape's makers through the city's cash only undergrounds while building the patient, circumstantial case against Thurman, and Block surrounds him with the series' great repertory: Elaine, the call girl turned partner in something like grace; TJ, the Times Square street kid talking his way into an apprenticeship; and Mick Ballou, the butcher's aproned Irish gangster whose after hours communions with Scudder, war stories at the Grogan's bar until morning mass, anchor the book's moral registry. The resolutions arrive off the books, as they must, and cost what Scudder's resolutions cost.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the private eye novel at its darkest and most humane simultaneously, the Scudder series at full depth.
Historical Context & Significance
A Dance at the Slaughterhouse won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1992, the crown of the Scudder sequence's great middle period: the previous entry, A Ticket to the Boneyard, had escalated the series' darkness, and this one's snuff film premise took the era's ugliest urban legend and processed it with a moralist's seriousness, the sensational material earning its keep.
Lawrence Block was by then the profession's complete craftsman, the burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr comedies and decades of pseudonymous apprenticeship behind him, and the Edgar, followed by the Grand Master title, sealed a standing his peers already granted him. Scudder's sobriety, tracked meeting by meeting across the series, stands among crime fiction's most sustained portraits of recovery, the case work and the step work as one discipline.
Liam Neeson later carried the character in the film of A Walk Among the Tombstones; the books' New York, pre gentrification Hell's Kitchen with the lights going out, is now itself a period document, preserved at street level.