Customer Reviews

The Rocksburg Railroad Murders / The Blank Page (A Godine Double Detective)

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"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 charge of the local State Police barracks in the previous mystery "The Man Who Like to Look at Himself" has been temporarily replaced by Lt. Walker Johnson, who is more in the mold of Lt. Phil Moyer from "The Rocksburg Railroad Murders" in terms of providing support for Balzic rather than an constant impediment in the search for the murderer. By removing the set of stereotypical clowns getting in the way of Balzic's investigation, Constantine is able to keep the story's focus on the chief's interrogative skills.

In the current dichotomy represented by television's "Law & Order" and "C.S.I." franchises, Constantine's Balzic is clearly in the camp of the former. The focus here is not on forensic science or the ability to beat and/or shoot up bad guys, but rather on asking the right questions in order to gather the necessary information. Reading these books is waiting for the key piece of the puzzle to show up so that everything can fall into place, at which point Balzic can go bring in the murderer. These novels are not so much about police procedure as they are the lost art of interrogation. Of course, in Constantine's hands these interrogations rarely take place in a special room at the police station.

"The Blank Page" is the best of the first three Mario Balzic novels, although readers who are captivated by some of the more colorful characters in Rocksburg may well wish Father Mazzo and Mo Vulcanas were more involved in the story as they were respectively in the first two books. Personally, I would like to see a bit more of Balzic's family, since they tend to provide nice counterpoints to the crime being investigated. But the most important other character in these novels to this point in the series clearly ends up being the murderer. I would not go so far a to say Balzic shows compassion for the murderers he catches (with the exception being what happened in the second novel), but there is certainly a strong sense of empathy and understanding towards the story they have to tell. But then, it is that ability to look at things from the perspective of others that is Balzic's greatest asset when it comes to solving crimes.