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It has been said that Westerns and crime fiction have much in common: tough, taciturn, sentimental and persistent protagonists; a concern with justice, professional and personal honor; and the portrayal of the law in upholding or subverting these. Barry Siegel’s novel of legal suspense features all of these: a gory and well-deserved murder, a deft and guileless fall-gal, a corrupt and twisted sheriff, a bucolic community menaced by evil and polluting money forces and an unflinching lawyer waging his (almost) solitary campaign for the life of an innocent condemned to die, for the welfare of the township and for the souls of professional colleagues and other participants.

Sarah, the victim of injustice, had been an outsider and an eco-terrorist who stalked, threatened and even attacked a villainous entrepreneur who ends up murdered. Perhaps she was (perhaps still is) dangerously unstable. But she is no murderer and has been railroaded, now sitting in jail facing execution for what others have done. Should not wrong be righted? “There’s no right or wrong in court,” her attorney Greg, her Galahad, is told. “Just winners and losers.” Even the judge handling Sarah’s habeas corpus petition points out that trials rarely yield incontestable truth: “We traffic in the world of reasonable doubt.”

Greg, who lives by these rules, abandons them long enough to defeat the looming forces of big cash and restore a lot of folks’ faith in mankind. The moral may be misleading but, as one endearingly equivocal lady says, “We need to make clear who the victims and the villains are, don’t we? The world being so confusing, it needs that much clarity at least.” That’s what detective stories are supposed to do, and Siegel delivers a brisk and readable contribution to their shelf.

So does George Pelecanos, who writes about a Washington, D.C., as wild as the wildest West. “Shame the Devil” is not about the felons in the Capitol or White House but about the capital’s fouler underside: a sewer-full of lowlifes, meth-heads and dope fiends, runaways and pimps, grifters, shylocks, fences and genuine career criminals educated and self-educated in prison, exploiting the amateurs, despising marks and victims, and those survivors of the victims who wait for a justice that will never come. The only justice lies in prohibited retaliation and revenge, and even they won’t let you sleep at night. This is a world in which cars are beautiful and everyone’s unhappy; a world of cheap lives and expensive watches in which characters are identified by the tunes they bond with; where those who are not evil are stupid, and those who are neither are too often weak until they grab at fate and shake it till it rattles like death, like revenge, like resolution of some kind.

The gripping tale Pelecanos tells is about that sort of resolution, and it is very fast, very hard and very dirty. Setting and mood are bleak. Images are projected from the downside down: through the bloodshot eyes of gearheads, across vinyl seats and Formica tops, along the sights of guns. The District and the action are mapped out in recurrent driving instructions through the urban wastelands: “east on U., out up Ruth to Irving, take that east, left on Kennedy Street before the New Hampshire turnoff” and so on.

That’s how the story starts, with injunctions to the driver of a stolen car, and one guy singing “One in a Million You” and the other guys in the car sweating. They are about to hit a restaurant where their robbery goes tragically, vividly awry, with people on all sides killed or maimed. The killer who got away will seek revenge in more frigid slaughter. So will some survivors of his innocent victims. Everyone grieves in his own way, and the parallel courses to revenge culminate in a brutal reckoning. “Anyone,” William James once said, “is ready to be savage in some cause.” The difference between the good and bad lies in the choice of the cause.

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A very good novelist, Evan Hunter, published “The Blackboard Jungle” in 1954, and MGM soon turned it into a film. It was about a young teacher learning to survive in a school for losers for whom survival was likely to stretch out too long, about the sorry state of the educational system, about adults in conflict with the young and vice versa, about America as an adolescent nation and “our so-called adult responses that are sometimes adolescent.” A number of the novels that Hunter went on to write, “Mothers and Daughters,” for example, in 1962, dealt with these themes and with the emptiness of post-1945 life as the author felt it, the void at the center of many people and things.

For some reason, even though he wrote them well, Hunter was not satisfied with novels of social or psychological significance only, with messed-up people, tormented psyches, quivering ids. Something more superficial might be fun: “entertaining, suspenseful, exciting,” forbearing from “comments on the society we live in.” So Hunter turned into Ed McBain, and McBain originated the Bath Precinct series, in which crime was dealt with not by omniscient figures or solitary P.I.s but by a conglomerate: a squad of cops working with or rubbing against other squads in other city precincts. As spare and taut as their more literary counterpart--although less fraught--these are well-wrought books that please intelligent readers but comfort the mindless too by ease of access and consumption. So, in whatever category you count yourself, McBain offers a reliable brand, good quality, entertaining and suspenseful, just as he said he would. And if you buy “The Last Dance,” you get just what you paid for once again.

An old man’s murder is made to appear a suicide. A young whore is knifed. A snitch is rubbed out. A hit man is denounced and arrested after he’s done his damage and before he does more. An old woman’s neck is broken, all in a day’s work or a night’s. And here to see if they can make sense of disparate bits of mischief are the men and women of the NYPD, especially the detectives of that 87th Precinct which McBain has made famous in its banal routine and its mutually uncomprehending yet comradely cast drawn from many genders, races, creeds, doing their tough, underpaid job of dealing with predators, stalkers, beasts, occupiers of the night and of nightmares, leading their own jumbly lives and getting everything over in just enough pages to justify a price of $25 before discounting.

Detective Carella is back, the lapsed Catholic with the nice wife who was born without hearing, and Detective Meyer, his Jewish partner and friend who feels as ill-at-ease at Christmas as Carella does at a Seder. And there is Fat Ollie, a lumbering menace who hates everyone regardless of race, color or creed, dreams of playing the piano and likes dead people better than live ones because they give him less trouble.

All carry out their duties in a city McBain presents as a bureaucratic monolith that costs more to run than the entire nation of Zaire--a city where 10 people do the job of one because school dropouts are hired and taught to greet the public with blank or hostile stares, where allegedly civil servants are angry at the system because they can’t steal from it and where a once-respected homicide division, infiltrated by jackasses and chuckleheads, is now respected on television only. So McBain, or Hunter (or whoever tells all this), has not stuck to his guns about avoiding social comment because it is impossible to write police novels without it. He hasn’t kept his word, which is all the better for us because he retains mastery of words, plots, small tragedies and still smaller triumphs. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.