The Blank Page

"The Rocksburg Railroad Murders" is the first volume in the series Mario Balzic series of K. C. Constantine. Balzic is described as "a hokey, untypical detective who works from a bedrock of compassion and shrewd common sense." But do not let this bit of endpiece hyperbole dissuade you from checking out this mystery. Yes, there are some stereotypical elements in this novel--the chief hates the pompous district attorney Milt Weigh and the overly inquisitive reporter Dick Deitz, but this is also a chief of police who does not like his cops running around with guns (thing "Destry"). Mario has teenager daughters who are trying to tolerate his eccentricities, an elderly mother who remembers basically everything anybody has ever done in this town, and is friends with Father Marazzo, who is willing to listen to anything the chief wants to get off his chest. A man Mario has known since childhood is found bludgeoned to death with a Coke bottle on the platform of the Rocksburg railroad station. The damage is so bad Mario has to be told the name of the victim. From his initial investigation Mario becomes convinced that the man's stepson is the guilty party, but proving it is going to prove rather difficult for a lot of reasons. As the title indicates, this is only the first murder in the book and the tension builds as we wait for the second victim to drop. For Constantine characterization assumes more of an importance than the detective work in this novel, because Mario pays as much attention to the need for compassion as he does for the search for clues. This is a nice start. We get a good sense of the lay of the land, not only of Rocksburg but more importantly of the way Mario Balzic thinks and the way he feels. For me, this was enough to motivate me to move directly to the next story in the series, "The Man Who Like to Look at Himself." Except for the Spenser for Hire series I have never really a lot of mysteries per se, and when I do it is character more than story that grabs my interest. Warning: Constantine does not divide his novles into chapters, so if you settle down to read this book intending to finish the first chapter before you go to sleep, you are going to by up all night. "The Blank Page," the third novel in the series, begins when Chief Balzic receives a phone call from Miss Cynthia Summers who reports that she has not seen one of her student roomers for several days. Paying a courtesy call sounds a lot better to Balzic than working on the budget report until he finds the body of Janet Pisula on the floor of her room. The young woman has been strangled with her brassiere, wearing only her panties, with a blank sheet of paper resting on top of her body. The murder had happened sometime the previous week and nobody in the rooming house or on campus had noticed Janet had suddenly disappeared. By this point Constantine has clearly settled on a specific literary modus operandi. Lt. Harry Minyon, the blundering blowhard who was in c