An enigmatic writer, who rarely gives interviews and whose real name is even a matter of debate, K.C. Constantine is the creator of Mario Balzic, chief of police in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Rocksburg. Beginning with The Rocksburg Railroad Murders in 1972, he has written nearly twenty gritty novels which chronicle Balzic's life in a once proud industrial town that is suffering from the effects of industrial decline. Men have lost their jobs and their self-respect. Old values and beliefs are under threat. Constantine uses the conventions and motifs of crime fiction to write novels in which these changes are brilliantly explored. Like George V. Higgins, he is at his best in his dialogue, which shows he has a pitch-perfect ear for the rhythms and music of everyday American speech. In the second of the Rocksburg books, The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself, Constantine is in top form as Balzic painstakingly works towards the truth about a murder that only comes to light when an assortment of body parts is unearthed in land leased out for hunting. Amid controversies stirred by allegations of police racism and the distractions provided by over-eager subordinates, the police chief is determined to find the killer. As in all the Rocksburg novels, the crime becomes the hook on which Constantine can hang his analysis of the society in which it takes place.

In more recent novels such as Blood Mud, in which Balzic, retired but investigating dodgy insurance claims, is struggling with health problems, Constantine has very nearly deserted the crime genre altogether in favor of fiction driven entirely by character. Paradoxically, Balzic and his world seem less vivid in these later novels than they do in earlier books such as The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself, in which the dialogue and the characterization are more in service to a conventional crime plot.

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