K. C. CONSTANTINE – Bottom Liner Blues. Mario Balzic #10. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1993; paperback, 1994.

   This is the first Balzic book from Constantine in three years. He doesn’t churn them out; the first in the series appeared in 1972. He has achieved an enviable reputation not only as a mystery writer, but a writer of regional fiction.

   Mario Balzic is the 64 year-old Chief of Police in Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, a thoroughly depressed and depressing area of the state devastated by the collapse of the coal mining and steel industries. He’s feeling his age. His mother died not too long ago, and this triggered an ongoing reevaluation by his wife of their marriage and her life; he’s having minor problems with a City Father, and the area is undergoing a record drought and heat wave.

   As the book opens, he is confronted with two problems. First, he’s called to the boondocks to talk to a woman with a small child, who spins a disjointed tale of a husband who is threatening to kill the man married to his ex-wife for abusing his children. The woman won’t reveal her name or her husband’s, but does give Balzic the name of the alleged abuser.

   Second, a Russian-American writer he knows slightly is causing problems in his favorite bar, ranting and raving and running the customers off. From these two things the rest of the book flows, and the larger part from the latter.

   This may be good regional fiction; I don’t think so, but it may be. It isn’t a good crime novel. More than anything else it is a sustained diatribe, by the Russian, by Balzic’s wife Ruth, by Balzic himself. Page after page after page consists of pure dialogue or monolog deploring everything from the economy, to a woman’s role in life and marriage, to the unfair way America treats its writers, to life in general. It is a sustained cry from the hearts of several unhappy people, some of them desperately so. One wonders about Constantine himself.

   As always in Constantine’s books, the characterization is sharp and in depth, and his ear for regional dialect is superb. There is no real plot, no real sense of resolution; this is slice of life stuff. Narration is minimal — if the speeches were removed, I doubt the book would be fifty pages long. Bottom Liner Blues may be a good, even a fine, book; that, of course, is as always a matter of subjective evaluation. What it isn’t is a murder mystery, a detective story, or even a crime novel. What it is in my opinion is an exercise in self-indulgence.

Bibliographic Note:   There are 17 books in this series, appearing between 1972 and 2002.