K.C. Constantine is the pseudonym of an author of Police Procedurals/Detective Stories involving a police chief, Mario Balzic, who heads a small town police force. The town is the fictional Rocksbmg somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Writing about Constantine gives me a chance to both praise a series of mysteries I have enjoyed and to rail against pseudonyms. I believe there are nine novels in all.
As to pseudonyms, they are usually to protect the author’s privacy. K.C. Constantine, who has provided some biographical details in an afterword to two of his novels certainly claims that that is why he wishes to remain pseudonymous. I, for one, mainly resent the pseudonym because I always want to know how the author knows what he/she knows. Admittedly, my interest goes beyond that as well. I am willing to admit that if the author ever broke wind, I want to know that as well.
Thomas Pynchon may not be a pseudonym, but no one knows much about the author of “V” and Gravity’s Rainbow. J.D. Salinger also may not be a pseudonym, but we know little about the author of The Catcher in the Rye. In fact, there is a critical theory that says Salinger and Pynchon are one and the same. I do not agree!
If the author won’t provide anything but the work, are we to conclude that the works are autobiographical? Is Mario Balzic K.C. Constantine? Let’s digress for some titles.
The first book is the Rocksburgh Railroad Murders. That was followed by The Blank Page. Other titles in the series are The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself, Once Upon a Midnight Clear, A Fix Like This, Always a Body to Trade, and Sunshine Enemies.
The mysteries, as in the best series, are quite secondary. The life of Rocksburg is what is best portrayed. Mario talks to the local priest, Father Marazo, and drinks at Muscotti’s Bar. There is a drunken (sometimes) lawyer who is really a good lawyer when he is sober. Above all, there is Balzik’s wife, his mother who lives with them, and two daughters.
The town is home to Poles, Croats, and Italians who would today be called ethnics. The steel mills have all closed and work is hard to find. Rocksburg is in western Pennsylvania, somewhere near Pittsburgh.
Judging from the novels and Constantine’s one afterward, Balzic/Constantine was a marine in World War II. He is not much for big cities, nor for violence. I cannot remember Mario being personally attacked a Ia Chandler in any of the books. He prefers the brain to the gun. He knows everyone in town, so getting information is no problem. Especially when he has his wife and mother to supplement anything he missed.
I believe the last book Sunshine Enemies has a copyright of 1990. In that book Balzic’s mother dies, and Mario suffers sexual dysfunction. Though a Balzic book could come and go without fanfare, I believe there has not been such a book. It is even possible that K.C. Constantine is dead. That is one of the disadvantages of pseudonym. However, let us hope any· report of his death is premature.
This is a perfect place to end this article, but I want to quote from Robert W. Wink’s afterward to the Dav,id Godine duo book of the Rocksburg Railroad Murders and The Blank Page. The town, not the railroad, remained the subject. Here was a place where many different Americans of different ethnic backgrounds, had been working out their complex code of life, a mix peculiar to small town, ethnic, blue-collar America. This w a s not Ross Macdonald’s Santa Barbara, or Ed McBain’s Isola, et cetera. I might add it is not Chandler’s L.A., or Valen’s Cincinnati, it is small/tough town U.S.A. somewhere out in the rust belt, where the information highway has yet to arrive. Constantine brings it alive. Oh! Balzic also catches the murderer(s), but that’s hardly the point.