The Hunt for Merle Constiner

By Peter Ruber

[An earlier version of this essay appeared in the September 1999 issue of Pulpdom. ]

Seven miles from Monroe, Ohio, a Western-theme painting hangs in memory of Merle Constiner at the Middletown Public Library. It was purchased by the library from book royalties Constiner had bequeathed to the library through his literary agent, Eleanor Woods of the Blassingame-Spectrum Literary Agency. "It was a small amount," recalls library director Douglas Bean. "We didn't know what we could do with it, so we put it in the bank and let the interest accrue." Fifteen years later Bean saw a painting that appeared to personify the writer's vision of the Old West, and he purchased it for the library.

Little is known today about Merle Constiner, one of the many shadowy men and women who once wrote for the now-crumbling pages of the pulp magazine era. Constiner is practically forgotten, except by the few residents of Monroe who had known him during the last few decades of his life. They remember him primarily as a shy, reclusive writer of Western and historical adventure novels for young readers; but none had ever seen or read any of Constiner's pulp fiction, until I donated a thousand pages of photocopies to the Monroe Historical Society.

I read my first Merle Constiner story in 1996 when I opened a copy of Herbert Ruhm's The Hard-Boiled Detective, a 1977 collection of stories that had appeared in Black Mask. This anthology had been sitting on my shelves, unread, for almost 20 years. Sandwiched between some of my favorite masters of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction -- Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner -- was Constiner's amusing story "The Turkey Buzzard Blues."

"The Turkey Buzzard Blues" surprised me. Here was first-rate storytelling with crackling dialogue, a wry sense of humor, and a well-plotted mystery. Constiner was a writer with a polished style and an uncanny knack for creating unusual characters. I reread the story soon after and enjoyed it even more, kicking myself that I had waited so long to read the book.

Finding writers one likes is usually an accidental process, rather like unexpectedly tripping over the root of a tree and finding an old Indian arrowhead or a gold nugget. The discovery process is only half the fun; the other half is playing bloodhound: collecting their writings, and digging into their life and times. Lesser-known writers like Merle Constiner always present a difficult challenge.

The first fragmentary clues of Constiner's literary career were provided by Bill Pronzini's brief sketch of Constiner in 20th Century Western Writers, and a handful of clippings he was able to send me. One of these, a photocopy of the back flap to one of his books, indicated Constiner had lived in Monroe, Ohio, "most of his life." So that became my starting point.

Since Constiner died only 20 years ago, I went on the expectation of finding family and friends in and around Monroe, Ohio. The Internet telephone directories produced a phone number for Dale Constiner, who turned out to be Merle's cousin. He was not inclined to speak about Merle for reasons he did not wish to make clear, but he suggested I contact Douglas Bean, director of the Middletown Public Library. Bean led me to George Crout, a retired local historian; and he referred me to Pauline Schmidt, historian for the Monroe Historical Society. After many phone interviews and letters, the slim record of Merle Constiner's life finally came into focus.

Merle Constiner's literary output was small compared to that of many contemporaries. His short stories and novelettes number approximately 100, perhaps a few more, and they fall primarily into three genres: detective and mystery stories, Westerns, and historical adventures set in the Colonial era to the first few decades of the 1800s -- a slice of time that provided a life-long fascination for Constiner.

When the pulp magazines vanished in the early 1950s, Constiner transitioned easily to mass circulation slick magazines like Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and Country Gentleman, because his writing had a high level of craftsmanship.

He virtually ceased writing short stories by the early 1960s. Magazine fiction markets in general were in decline, so he turned to writing Western novels for paperback publisher Ace Books, and several junior historical adventures for hard-cover publishers. None of these was exceptionally long. All averaged around 40,000 words and could by definition be more appropriately called novellas. His only work that could be called book-length was Hearse of a Different Color, which ran to 63,000 words. It was the book publication of "Death on a Party Line," which had appeared serially in Short Stories.

Constiner was most comfortable writing novelette-length fiction that ran between 15,000 and 23,000 words. This space allowed him ample room to develop his characters and plots. Factor in his economy of style, and usually the reader got as much satisfaction as reading a novel. Constiner's historical fiction stands out for the same reasons. He is articulate; his style is lean, tough, honed to a sharp edge, and his narrative and dialogue are sprinkled with ironic twists and dark, wry humor.

Constiner was also a writer who matured with age. Some of his best writing was produced in the latter decades of his life. Even the stroke he suffered in 1970, no doubt the consequence of a lifelong over-consumption of cold black coffee and something on the order of "less than 100 cigarettes per day," did not keep him long from his typewriter.

George Crout, a Monroe-area historian who knew Constiner and had written several newspaper articles about him, told me, "[Constiner] wrote slowly, deliberately. He was always conscious about the historical accuracy of the customs and speech patterns, dress, social manners, and other facets of life in and around the Ohio and Tennessee valleys during the early 1800s."

In a letter to the editor published in the April 1946 issue of Adventure, Constiner reveals his penchant for historical research, relative to his story, "A Cannon for Mr. Bibbs":

"In digging out the background I've run into some swell material. I delved back into the history of Hamilton, our county seat here, because I considered it a typical Ohio town of the time: not far from the Ohio River, on a canal, and so forth. (In 1803 the county was paying a dollar per for wolf scalps, by 1825 big business was already getting a foothold.) I learned, to my surprise, that there was a branch of the Tammany Society of New York here in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1812 -- known as 'Wigwam No. 9,' highly secretive, with messengers and runners sent all over the country, and known to have done much 'mischief.'"

Constiner rambled on to discuss the entertainment and diversions in those days, which consisted of "circuses with live animals being exhibited in fancy hotels, and exhibits of traveling wax-works, and about indented apprentices..."; to using original 1830 terminology in his story, whenever he could; how hotels in the Ohio country were a "strange mixture of European wines, ballroom manners, and backwoods' ruggedness," whose owners employed "a regular house hunter who supplied the hotel with venison and bear." In discussing hotel security, Constiner wrote, "There is an account of a woman traveler and her daughter who asked the innkeeper for a room with a lock and was given a hammer and some nails with the instruction to nail herself in until breakfast."

In an April 1949 autobiographical piece for Blue Book, Constiner says: "My particular interest is in building up a library of early American roguery and vagabondage -- the sleights and speech of wandering packmen, doctors, dentists, fire-eaters and so on (our hinterland highways and wilderness trails were literally jammed with them for many years)...now and then you uncover something, and when you add it to what you've already got, the picture grows. And it's a pretty stirring picture."

And when Constiner sat down before his typewriter, these strange casts of characters and the roguery come to life. The middle-America region from Ohio to Tennessee was filled with highwaymen, river pirates and larcenous businessmen who would just as soon murder an unwary traveler as give him shelter. Constiner doesn't bludgeon readers with his arcane knowledge of history, but weaves the details subtly into the fabric of a story: through his colorful descriptions of the geography, the slang, the social customs, dress, housing, and the odd and primitive dietary habits of those times.

Constiner's scholarship and attention to historical detail is also very evident in his Western novels. They're not the shoot-'em-ups typified in the movies. Readers get a vivid picture of how rugged the old West probably was, with its unforgiving wilderness, pocked with seedy backwoods homesteads, claptrap frontier towns and dusty cattle way stations, and villains of the lowest, meanest order.

No matter what his heroes were -- whether saloon owner, rancher, cattleman or drifter -- all have a sense of justice in a land often without law. They track the killers and badmen with relentless determination. Not that they're above the law, but because the hunt is usually motivated by personal reasons. Many of Constiner's heroes easily fit the mold of Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe -- on horseback. They are loners. They have a sixth sense for trouble, and when backed into a corner they respond with swift and deadly accuracy.

"Although his characters tend to become involved in more or less conventional situations," writes Bill Pronzini, in 20th Century Western Writers, "they do not act or react quite like any others in western fiction. For these reasons, and for pure entertainment value, Constiner's books are well worth seeking out in secondhand stores."

Francis Merle Constiner was born in Monroe, Ohio, in 1901. The Constiners were among the early settlers in the region. His grandfather was a Methodist minister in the 1880s. His father, Frank Constiner, was master of the local one-room school house. In later decades, as the town was built up, Frank Constiner became principal of the local high school.

Little is known about Merle Constiner's early years, except that his father was a "strict and harsh disciplinarian at Monroe High School," says Pauline Schmidt, and undoubtedly at home as well. Merle's shyness and the reclusive tendencies he exhibited later in life could be the result of having been intimidated by his father.

Pauline Schmidt writes, "A genealogy in our files documents that the LeSourd-Constiner family was an early pioneer one in this area. Locally, it is a well-known fact that Merle's family were never on good terms with their contemporary relatives so you will not get any information from cousin Dale who still lives here." One suspects that the autocratic Frank Constiner might have been cause.

Merle was sent away to college sometime in 1919 or 1920. Describing those years in a book-jacket blurb, Merle said that he was "dragged through four colleges" before he was finally assaulted with an M.A. degree in journalism [in 1928] from Vanderbilt University, in Memphis, Tenn. Sometime during those extended college years, Merle spent a year or more working on coffee freighters in the South American trade.

He mentions in several newspaper interviews that he began writing and selling stories during his final year at Vanderbilt. Some of it was poetry, which he abandoned fairly quickly, because he couldn't make a living at it. And he tells of writing stories about the Tennessee hill folks. But nowhere does he provide clues as to where these might have been published, or what he did for the next decade. With a degree in journalism, it's possible he supported himself by working for various newspapers in the Memphis area.

Only recently, after this essay was originally published, did several early examples of Constiner's published fiction come to light. The first, "Big Singing," appeared in the January 1931 Household Magazine and was anthologized the following year in O'Brien's Prize Stories of 1932. The second was "Dossie Bell," in the Summer 1931 issue of Prairie Schooner, a literary magazine published by the University of Nebraska. Both were slight regional tales set in the Tennessee hills, and collaborations with Jack H. Boone, who had been one of Constiner's English professors at Vanderbilt University, Nashville.

Few facts about this period in Constiner's life are clear; he seldom talked about himself, even to people he knew. During his high school years, Ronald Steward, who now lives in Seattle, delivered newspapers to Constiner and often chatted with the writer. He recalls that Constiner was secretive about his life; he spoke only about what he was researching and writing at those moments, and always with great enthusiasm.

Apparently Constiner did not return home immediately after graduation. He met a Southern gal named Susannah, whom he eventually married in 1934, and they moved to Akron, Ohio, where Constiner settled in to write, while his wife went to work.

Constiner was 39 when his first known pulp story, "Strangler's Kill," was published in the August 1940 issue of Dime Detective Magazine. He said in one interview that he began writing full time in 1939. This either contradicts his other statements, or he didn't believe his earlier writings were worth discussing. To a large degree we form a picture of a man who was as eccentric as the characters he created in his stories and books.

"Strangler's Kill" featured an unusual and quirky private investigator (Wardlow Rock) nicknamed the "Dean." The Dean was a squirrelly character: an intellectual like his creator who possessed obscure facts that helped him solve oddball crimes. And like Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry," the Dean lugged a Magnum .357 revolver in a shoulder holster, which he didn't hesitate to use. Constiner had much fun spoofing the hard-boiled detective story with this series of 19 novelettes, and the plots are often too wildly imaginative to describe.

To give you some idea of the tongue-in-cheek story lines Constiner concocted, the editorial note for the second Dean story, "You're in My Way," tells it all: "Take an undertaker's scrapbook, a butcher bird, four lipsticks, a deck of playing cards, a loop of string and a lump of putty -- throw them all together in a heap, then find a mule who dances on his hind legs to cavort in a grisly rigadoon around the pile. That's what the Dean did -- and cleaned up a tank town that had gotten too tough in the process, to say nothing of solving the riddle of the embalmer who embalmed the embalmer." Definitely irresistible.

The same quirky storylines are pervasive in Constiner's only other detective series, which ran concurrently in Black Mask and featured Luther McGavock, an operative with the Atherton Browne Detective Agency of Memphis, Tenn. McGavock is often assigned to solve outlandish cases in the backwoods towns of the Tennessee hill country, which, although set in the 1940s, were still entrenched in an early 20th century lifestyle -- where everybody is a town character and the hatreds run deep. McGavock appeared in 11 of Constiner's 12 stories for Black Mask, and I suspect that he tired of the series formula and was anxious to move onto other types of stories.

Constiner's pulp detective stories tend to be dated by today's standards. But they have a certain charm and are often superior to what was published in those rough-paper magazines. He artfully blends good storytelling and complicated plotting, with a gentle spoofing of the genre.

Take private-eye Charlie Blandin, in "Five Gray Rats," whom Constiner describes as follows:

"Charlie Blandin had been a private detective for forty years. He didn't look old, too old that is. He just looked antique. He stood straight as a hickory ramrod, and had just about that much meat on his frame. Mechanical aids, such as artificial teeth and bifocals, had long ago eliminated the human element in his bony horselike face...His nerves had atrophied years ago, leaving his gun hand as steady as a rock. He was interested in nothing under the sun but his work. He was a grave and dangerous man to be up against."

And when Charlie Blandin rolls into a seedy Ohio town that has seen better days, he quickly turns it upside down to ferret out a diabolical murder set-up masking a ten-year-old crime. Constiner did not set his crime stories in familiar turfs like Los Angeles, Chicago or New York. He stuck to his favorite milieu -- the cities and towns in Tennessee and Ohio -- always with good effect.

One also senses that Constiner chewed on his pencil to convey images of his characters in as few words as possible. Readers will overlook many exquisite paragraphs if they read his stories just for the action. In "Last Page of the Hangman's Diary" one finds these examples, which evoke memories of Raymond Chandler in his prime:

"She was expensively, almost coquettishly dressed. Yet when Kincaid slid into the seat across from her she looked at him, not as an average female observes a strange man, but as a veteran gambler peeps at an opponent's cards."

And --

"She had a way of rotating her underjaw when she spoke as though she were grinding the words with her back teeth.

"Sue Bell Sherrold, Kincaid decided, was a woman of will."

Soon after Constiner began appearing in Dime Detective and Black Mask, he cracked Adventure, Short Stories, Argosy, Blue Book, with occasional stopovers in Mammoth Detective, Popular Detective, Ten Detective Aces, New Detective Magazine, and others yet to be discovered.

It would be interesting to learn what else Constiner might have published prior to his inaugural appearance in Dime Detective, and the two stories mentioned above. Possibly he wrote under various pseudonyms. But he left behind no papers or correspondence to fill in the gaps.

In the late 1930s, perhaps at the request of his ailing father, Merle and Susannah moved back to Monroe. While Merle Constiner wrote in the seclusion of his father's home, Susannah worked at the nearby Monroe school. Pauline Schmidt writes me, "Merle inherited his father's house but lost it and never seemed to earn enough money to support the elegant (and extravagant) Southern lady he married. She was an intelligent and social person who was in contrast to his shy, reclusive, chain-smoking personality."

After losing his father's house, Merle and Susannah rented a tiny 3-room "gatekeeper's cottage" (since torn down). For some years Susannah rode a bus to Cincinnati to work in a department store; and to help meet expenses after her own retirement, she conducted a nursery school in the front parlor of their cottage.

Monroe residents have commented on Merle Constiner's reclusive nature, without regard to the fact that most writers tend to be solitary creatures. To Merle, writing was more than just work; it was a way of life. And with the exception of having worked on coffee freighters, he appears to have lived within a narrow radius of a few hundred miles of his birthtown all his life.

George Crout's obituary of Constiner reveals this interesting comment: "The author once said he had to discipline himself to keep on working, which he did...He said, 'It's a punishment the author must learn to adjust to. There were times I'd rather find something else to do, but I had to make myself go back there and write -- just like any other business, I hold daily office hours, and during those times, I write. But I can't turn my brain off when I finish writing, I'm always thinking, thinking.'" He kept at his routine for over 30 years until his stroke in 1970.

Constiner received a small circle of visitors into his home occasionally, which he shared also with a 150-pound Newfoundland named Lancelot Dulac. Among them was his paperboy Ronald Steward; Francis Burk, an engineer who supplied answers to the writer's technical questions; local historian George Crout; the late Presbyterian minister Frank Wiley, and a few others. But he was seldom seen in Monroe except for trips to the barbershop for a haircut and to meet the Bookmobile, says Pauline Schmidt. "His research (which was extensive and thorough) was carried on mainly through the public libraries of Middletown and Hamilton...and he used the interlibrary loan services to good advantage."

Merle Constiner's 1970 stroke interrupted the writing of a history of the American West, reveals a local newspaper clipping. He never resumed work on this book, though he did write one more historical adventure novel, Sumatra Alley (1971), and two more Western novels, Steel-Jacket (1972) and The Four from Gila Bend (1974), which rank among his very best work.

In July 1971, Constiner received another blow to his fragile condition. His wife of 37 years died after an illness. Her obituary said that during the 1950s she had organized the first Little Theater group in Monroe and was involved in numerous civic affairs. She had also been actively involved in her husband's researches.

Newspaper clippings show that Merle Constiner had a pragmatic view about his work. One reporter wrote in 1973: "The question of favorites out of his past writings makes him pause. 'Actually I'm not sure, I don't know,' he says."

A January 10, 1964 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer is a bit more revealing:

"The modest white-brick home of Merle Constiner at Monroe, Ohio, is alive with desperadoes, bad hombres, straight-shooting lawmen and a score of other characters.

"No one has ever seen all these critters except Mr. Constiner, but to him they are as alive as the flesh and blood that walk around him. They live first in the mind of Mr. Constiner, then on his 'white sheet' and finally in published short story or book.

"Not all of his works are Westerns; many are historical fiction. He likes his job (at times) and hates it (at others). But he can say what few men can claim -- he has made his living all his life at writing fiction.

"Sometimes, Mr. Constiner admitted the livelihood has not been good and sometimes not even promising, but it has been an existence and a mighty fine enjoyment sometimes.

"...He lives quietly, but industriously, behind closed doors. Slightly bent from his years, heavy of build with a slight mustache, and wearing shell-rimmed spectacles, Mr. Constiner fills the image (if there is one) of a writer. He loves talking to interesting people, but is camera-shy and doesn't wish to go out to meet the public.

"'If I ever had to go on a lecture tour, I'd die,' he said. 'I just shudder to think of it.'"

Throughout his writing career Constiner's attention to detail produced many baffling mysteries with edge-of-the-seat suspense. I use the word "mysteries" in the sense that most of his stories -- whether detective yarns, historical adventures or Westerns -- were essentially mysteries of one kind or another.

However, he was quite capable of writing entertaining general fiction. "Don't Darken My Door" and "The Fixer," which appeared in American Magazine, are excellent examples of what can rightly be called "regional" fiction.

Set in a small community in the backwoods of the Tennessee hills, they evoke the kind gentle humor and craftiness of village life that one encounters in the many stories August Derleth wrote about Sac Prairie, Wisconsin, and the Kentucky hill country immortalized by Jesse Stuart. One wishes there were more of these.

For a time I suspected Constiner might have accumulated a sizable reference library of his own, but Pauline Schmidt tells me that was not the case. "He never had the funds to buy books, and made judicious use of the bookmobiles that came once a week into the village."

What little correspondence and manuscripts he would have accumulated during his lifetime are gone, more than likely thrown out, says Schmidt. The few pieces of antique furniture and knickknacks he salvaged from the family home were auctioned off by the manager of the local bank to pay taxes and medical bills. She doubted there was enough to satisfy those debts. He left no will to file in Probate Court. He died quietly on September 24, 1979, as a charity patient at a local nursing home.

Many of Constiner's Western novels published by Ace Books were reprinted in new editions during the 1980s. Perhaps they will reappear again, from time to time, because his work is often compelling and stylish. I shall let Bill Pronzini have the last word:

"The best of [Constiner's] short work is probably 'Trail Trap,' which originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post -- an unusual blend of the traditional western with the detective story, the love story, and the tale of a young man coming of age.

"Noteworthy among Constiner's novels are his first, Last Stand at Anvil Pass, and such later works as Wolf on Horseback, Short-Trigger Man, and Steel-Jacket. The last is a particularly good tale of a tough but soft-hearted drifter who, against his better judgment, agrees to shepherd a young girl through the Oklahoma-Indian Territory in search of her father's stolen gold."

I can easily add all of Merle Constiner's other books to this list for one reason or another. Of his short fiction, suffice it to say that none of it is less than satisfying; it is always up to the high standards he set for himself. Had Constiner written a greater body of books and stories outside the action-adventure genres he might have achieved a minor reputation in what the academicians call "serious literature." But what he did publish during his lifetime is worth seeking out just for the satisfaction of reading it.

Copyright by Peter Ruber

Links:
Merle Constiner: A Bibliography in Progress
You'll find this checklist of Constiner's published work elsewhere on The Pulp Rack site. Just click here.

The Thrilling Detective Site
This great site, maintained by Kevin Burton Smith, has a brief description of Constiner's character Luther McGavock and a listing of those stories featuring the character at http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes/mcgavock.html. There's also an entry on another Constiner character, Dean Wardlow Rock, aka The Dean, with a similar listing of stories, at http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes/the_dean.html.

2Neat Books
This site sells back issues of The Saturday Evening Post, some of which include stories by Constiner. A brief listing of contents accompanies each issue listing at http://www.woodenski.com/2neat/sep.html.

Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames
This anthology of hard-boiled stories collected from various detective pulps is edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg. It's full of great, fun reading, with stories by Lester Dent, Raoul Whitfield, Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain, Frederick Nebel, Hugh B. Cave, and more. It also includes "The Arm of Mother Manzoli" by Constiner, a story featuring The Dean, which appeared in the April 1944 issue of Dime Detective. Click here for copies from Amazon.com.

Hard-Boiled Detectives
This anthology of 23 stories from Dime Detective Magazine, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, features a story about The Dean. Click here for copies from Amazon.com.

Posted by ds at December 8, 2002 03:37 PM

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