On the eve of St Patrick’s Day, 1882, Christchurch’s Irish community bustles with preparations to welcome the greatest Irish entertainer of the age – the legendary ‘Dancing Man’. On that same day, the forbidding police detective Inspector O’Rorke is invited to an elegant dinner party. As he and his hostess, the captivating Mrs Martin, are drawn towards each other, they must come to terms not only with the disapproval of society but the emergence from their past of secrets which threaten not only to ruin her reputation and blight his career, but endanger their very lives.
Others have secrets too: Colonel Martin, obsessed with the honour of his old regiment; the supercilious Captain Clark; Dermot Regan, the feared American Fenian stalking through the celebrating crowds; the retired veterans of Colonel Martin's old regimental guard, reassembling to march under arms for the last time; and Timothy O'Brien, the Dancing Man.
The destinies of each of these characters converge on the carriage-road across the Port Hills, where the final demands of loyalty, honour and retribution are resolved in an inevitably violent climax.
The Dancing Man follows the career of Inspector O’Rorke, (The Opawa Affair) and is intricate in plot and often dark in tone, shifting in time and place between Christchurch in 1882, Capetown in 1870, the Crimean War, the American Civil War and the Irish Fenian Rising of 1867. It is a story about loyalty and love, conventional hypocrisies, sexual freedom, and the futility of attempting to evade the remorseless undertow of past events.