One of the best collections of hardboiled pulp stories is THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE: STORIES FROM BLACK MASK MAGAZINE edited by Herbert Ruhm (Vintage, 1977). I was devouring this with gusto when I came upon a story called “Turkey Buzzard Blues” by Merle Constiner. And it is one of the best stories in the book, as good as the stories there by Hammett and Chandler and Gardner and Norbert Davis. And I realized I didn’t know a thing about Merle Constiner. I started finding and reading his stories, and clearly this was the work of a true professional. Constiner seemed fairly obscure, but the more I researched him, the more people I found who knew and loved his writing.

I found a 1999 ERB fanzine, Pulpdom, with an article about Constiner by Peter Ruber. To my surprise, Ruber wrote that he had first discovered Constiner by reading “Turkey Buzzard Blues” in THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE. I would later learn other collectors discovered Constiner the same way Peter Ruber and I had. Most of what I know about Merle Constiner comes from Ruber’s groundbreaking research. I also learned more about Constiner online from my Cumberland Road Elementary School classmate, Michael Grost.
What follows is my checklist of the complete works of Merle Constiner.

Frances Merle Constiner was born in Monroe, Ohio in 1901 and he died in Monroe, Ohio in 1979. Except for college at Vanderbilt in Memphis, Tennessee and some early years of travel, Merle chose to spend most of his life in the small town of Monroe. In the days before the internet, he learned about the history of our country by hunting down and buying books. He amassed a home library and said that his favorite time was when the Bookmobile came to town. He stayed home with his wife and their huge dog, and he wrote for a living. “He was… a recluse. He would not step out of the house. He worked all the time at writing”, Agatha Reed would say in a 1988 Mystery File interview.  His wife had a job teaching in Cincinnati and every morning she would ride the bus 30 miles down Reading Road into the city.
Full disclosure: for five years in the 1960s I lived 17 miles down Reading Road from the Constiners, and on occasion I used to ride that bus to Cincinnati that came down Reading Road every morning. Now, 60 years later, I like to imagine that I must have shared the bus with Mrs. Constiner on one of my forays into Cincinnati for movies and books.

And so, staying at home in Ohio, Constiner wrote detective stories for the pulps, and historical fiction, and he sold stories to the slicks. When the pulps died out in the 1950s, he did what a lot of pulp writers did. He adapted to the new market for fiction and wrote paperback originals, the pulps of the Sixties. He did a series of Westerns for Ace that are remarkable because most of them are also murder mystery stories. His hero was not the usual lawman or a gunslinger (although conveniently some of them had been gunslingers earlier in their lives, which comes in handy). His unlikely hero would be a bartender or a rancher who has to figure out who has murdered his boss or friend, or has to solve some mystery, like why hired gunslingers are beginning to congregate in his sleepy little town. All of them are solid good reading.

Merle Constiner was a scholar. His stories overflow with information about American language, especially slang, and early American history. The reader gets to feel something of what life must have been like in the nineteenth century.

But Merle Constiner will perhaps be most celebrated for his remarkable hardboiled detective pulp stories, most notably the Luther McGavock stories for Black Mask and the Adventures of the Dean for Dime Detective.

Altus Press, 2016

Black Mask, 2020. Introduction by Evan Lewis.

 

Black Mask, 2023.

 

Merle Constiner Checklist

I. Stories
1931-1935

Cover by Gustaf Tenggren.

 

Dossie Bell (with Jack Boone)
Prairie Schooner, Summer 1931. A story about Tennessee hill people, Luster Holder and his woman, Dossie Bell.
Big Singing (with Jack Boone)
The Household, January 1932. Chosen for The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, 1932. A story of the west Tennessee hills. It is the night of the Neely County Singing Convention, and Pole Meedon, the best baritone in Firbank, arrives in town.
Death Wife (with Jack Boone)
The Household, July 1933. When Jess Talbert finds a young woman passed out in the middle of his lane, he sees that she is hill folk like himself. He takes her in and after some months they are married. But Jess can never forget the memory of his dead first wife.
Lizard in the Spring
The Household, May 1935. Reprinted in Fiction Parade, July 1935. Folks in the Tennessee hills say a lizard in the spring helps keep the water clear, that it eats unclean things and keeps the spring pure. But Vinnie Siler wondered if that malignant-looking thing might not be Satan himself. Then, on the night of the quilt drawing, she understood everything.

1940-1962

Strangler’s Kill
Dime Detective, August 1940. Collected in HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES (Random House, 1992) and in THE COMPLETE CASES OF THE DEAN Vol. 1. Meet Dean Wardlow Rock, fortune teller, con artist and world-class detective. Our narrator is the Dean’s young assistant Ben Matthews, who shares their three-room apartment in the slums and uses his skills with guns and locks to help solve cases. If at first they remind you of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe, I think it is the realization that they are also a purely American Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes that brings these great tales to life. The plots are convoluted and ingenious and to try to break them down here would, I believe, ruin much of the joy of discovering these as a first-time reader.
(Note: all 18 Dean stories appear in THE COMPLEAT ADVENTUES OF THE DEAN.)

You’re in My Way
Dime Detective, December 1940. Collected in THE COMPLETE CASES OF THE DEAN Vol. 1. The second adventure of the Dean is neatly summarized in the Dime Detective intro: “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.”

One Corpse Too Many
Dime Detective, March 1941. Collected in THE COMPLETE CASES OF THE DEAN Vol. 1, and the 2016 Black Mask #1.  The third adventure of the Dean. The Dean carries a Magnum .357 and usually gets to use it at some point in each case.
The Puzzle of the Terrified Dummy
Dime Detective, August 1941. Collected in THE COMPLETE CASES OF THE DEAN Vol. 1. The Dean #4. It is somewhere along about here that readers of this series realize that these tales are set apart from almost all other hard-boiled detective pulp stories by their sheer audacity, their bizarre forays into folklore, their rich wit and deep knowledge of America’s history and archaic vocabulary.

They’ll Kill Again
Dime Detective, November 1941. The Dean #5. The Dean gets a case from a dead man’s hat handed to him by an interne. But he doesn’t know what he’s got until it blows up in his face.

 

 

The Riddle of the Phantom Mummy
Dime Detective, February 1942. The Dean #6. For anyone not clued in by that terrified dummy, the appearance of a phantom mummy lets us know there is nothing average or low-key about the Dean’s adventures. We are in another land, where the great fantasy, horror and adventure pulps meet the hardboiled detective.

The Riddle of the Bashful Ghost
Dime Detective, June 1942. The Dean #7. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. “There are three kinds of cases. The kind that seeks out the detective, the kind the detective digs up - and the kind that blossoms, suddenly and unexpectedly, like a gorgeous orchid, full in his face.”  

 

Let The Dead Alone
Black Mask, July 1942. The first Luther McGavock story. Collected in LET THE DEAD ALONE and in THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF BLACK MASK STORIES (Vintage Crime, 2010). McGavock works for the Atherton Browne Detective Agency in Memphis. He has a knack for rubbing people the wrong way. Nobody likes him at first sight. His boss sends him into small Southern towns to solve murder mysteries.  Luther always does solve them, although the small towns are always turned upside down and more people tend to die when Luther is blazing around town.
Luther arrives in a village down by the Mississippi border to find the murderer of Lester Hodges. A note has been left for him at the hotel; “Hodges can’t use your help now. Let the dead alone. Get out of town.”
Killer Take All
Dime Detective, August 1942. The Dean #8. “A monkey with imagination can wreak a lot of havoc before you scotch him. Take Chombo the Ninth – a killer with a heart of slag. We’d never have heard of Chombo at all if it hadn’t been for the client that was scared of a haugbui.” What’s a haugbui? “A corpse-creature, a loathsome monster, half-ghost, half-cadaver.”   
Let’s Count Corpses
Black Mask, September 1942. The second Luther McGavock mystery. Collected in LET THE DEAD ALONE. The case begins when a cropped-off dog’s ear is sent to the agency. “I’m sending you all they left me. Return the dog – dead or alive – and I’m prepared to pay you five thousand dollars.” Lester arrives in the small town near the Kentucky border to find his client’s brother murdered, and there is a man with a crossbow trying to kill Lester.
Mr. Bettleman’s Blisters
Dime Detective, November 1942. The Dean #9. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. The affair of the cinerary urn filled with black pepper.
Why Meddle With Murder?
Black Mask, January 1943. Luther McGavock #3. Collected in LET THE DEAD ALONE. Somebody in a small town on the Alabama line is murdering people, and Luther arrives to find someone has stolen the barber’s razors.
The Riddle of the Shackled Butler
Dime Detective, March 1943. The Dean #10. “Me, I’ve been working for a balmy boss so long that I sometimes wonder if I’m not getting a little squirrelly myself.”
The Nervous Doorbell
Dime Detective, June 1943. The Dean #11. The Dean and Ben are offered a page from the diary of Landru, the notorious French Bluebard, which leads them to the cruelest killer they have ever cornered.
The Turkey Buzzard Blues
Black Mask, July 1943. Collected in LET THE DEAD ALONE and THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE. Luther McGavock #4. Rockton is a quiet small town in the Tennessee hill country. The hotel clerk has stepped out for a coke-and-ammonia, “little moppets in pigtails and calico promenade with chuckle-heads with shaved craniums” – and a cruel, sneaking killer is on the loose with his garrote.
The Riddle of the Monster Bat
Dime Detective, September 1943. The Dean #12 When Professor Macklin dies, he leaves sixty pairs of bats from all over the world in his attic. But one of those bats is said to be enormous.
Kill One, Skip One
Black Mask, November 1943. Collected in THE HOUND WITH THE GOLDEN EYE. Luther McGavock #5. Evan Lewis on Constiner: “His writing is vivid, his characters complex, and his mysteries deep. Though the stories are all novelettes, there’s so much going on that each is as richly satisfying as a novel….The McGavock stories are… so rich in place and detail that they seem almost like a travelogue of small-town life in the Deep South.”
Parade of the Empty Shoes
Dime Detective, December 1943. The Dean #13. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. A client hires the Dean to find out why her murdered father has left his entire house to her – except the summer kitchen.

Where Nests the Water Snake
Adventure, December 1943, January & February 1944. Three-part serial. Tennessee, 1841: A man on horseback notices a riverboat full of cornstalks. Why would anyone ship a load of cornstalks? He follows the boat to find stolen goods and a murder plot that leads to the water-snake’s nest.

The Affair of the Pharmacist’s Fudge
Dime Detective, January 1944. The Dean #14. Two of the three Oldham brothers have died mysteriously. Now the third one is worried about this pharmacist’s assistant, Eric Saarhard from the University of the Third Heaven.
The Arm of Mother Manzoli
Dime Detective, April 1944. The Dean #15. Collected in TOUGH GUYS & DANGEROUS DAMES (Barnes & Noble, 1993). This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. The Dean likes to pose as an amiable crackpot, and this Case involves imitation diamonds, murder and a wax sculpture of an arm.
The Hound With the Golden Eye
Black Mask, May 1944. Collected in THE HOUND WITH THE GOLDEN EYE. Luther McGavock #6. The rich folklore of the small-town South permeates each of the McGavock stories, with the town square and courthouse, backwoods sheriffs, hound dogs for hunting, popskull moonshine, hillman slang and back-country life weaving through most of the murder mysteries.

The Puzzle of the Padlocked Furnace
Dime Detective, July 1944. The Dean #16. “If it was murder, it was plenty cunning. And if it wasn’t murder, it was most remarkable.” The Dean investigates the Gleason case when a letter arrives written in Ogam, an ancient form of Celtic writing. Right up the Dean’s alley.
The Affair of the Four Skeletons
Dime Detective, September 1944. The Dean #17. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. The case had everything from a twelfth-century drinking horn and wolf-dogs to a nonexistent man the Dean called Mr. Cemetery.
Killer Stay ‘Way From my Door
Black Mask, November 1944. Collected in THE HOUND WITH THE GOLDEN EYE. Luther McGavock #7. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. As soon as McGavock arrives in the small Tennessee hills village of Ashton to solve a murder, another one pops up. And then a third.
Until the Undertaker Comes
Black Mask, March 1945. Collected in THE HOUND WITH THE GOLDEN EYE. Luther McGavock #8. On McGavock’s first night in Heatherton there are already two dead, with an elusive undertaker’s assistant ready to embalm the murder victims as fast as the killer could dispose of them.
The Affair of the Bedridden Pickpocket
Dime Detective, April 1945. The Dean #18. When the doctor examines a bedridden old lady, she steals his watch. They find it under her pillow. How can she have become an expert pickpocket?

The Black Hammer
Adventure, May 1945. A Kentucky hillman goes north to work on the big ditch, a canal being dug along Ohio’s Zane Trace. But when he stops at The Black Hammer Inn to rest, he discovers murder and gets a deputy’s star pinned to his buckskins.
The Witch of Birdfoot Branch
Black Mask, May 1945. Constiner’s only non-McGavock appearance in Black Mask was this story about a hill country farmer who says a witch has killed his cow. The sheriff laughs at first, but then an invalid starts corresponding with the deceased and a mad killer stuffs tea bags with strychnine.
The Skull of Barnaby Shattuck
Short Stories, May 25, 1945. Reprinted in Weird Tales, July 1951 and Phantom, August 1957. A Philadelphia hatter journeying to Nashville accidentally becomes involved with a gang of thieves and cutthroats.

Last Page of the Hangman’s Diary
Ten Detective Aces, July 1945. A detective named Kincaid is hired to find a stolen book. The search leads him to three murders

The Kitchen of Master Lefrevre
Dime Detective, December 1945. The Dean #18 of 18. The Dean is intrigued by a newspaper want ad for viper’s meat. This leads to a corpse. The dead man’s “lips were drawn back in a horsey, soundless whinny, the whinny of death”. Every apothecary shop had its kitchen, and one of the ingredients for poison antidote is viper’s meat.
Hand Me Down My Thirty-Eight
Black Mask, January 1946.  Luther McGavock #9. Atherton Browne knows McGavock is the best detective he’s got. He has never missed on a case. But you have to fool him somehow to get him started. And Browne fools him every time.
A Cannon For Mr. Bibbs
Adventure, April 1946. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. A schoolmaster buys a tavern on the Ohio canal in 1839.

 

Black of the Moon
Mammoth Detective, May 1946. This story is available online at The Luminist. A detective arrives in a small town to solve a robbery that happened twenty years ago. Perhaps Constiner’s weakest story. When your manuscript was rejected by the top-drawer Black Mask and Dime Detective, your agent would offer it to a magazine that paid less, like Mammoth Detective.
Death on a Party Line
Short Stories July 10 & July 25, August 10 & August 26, 1946. Four-part serialized novel. Published in book form as HEARSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR, and as an Australian digest, DEATH ON A PARTY LINE. Scholar and semanticist Paul Saxby travels to Tennessee to study “words and the way people talk”. But when he arrives, the woman who had invited him has been found murdered, and he is forced to turn detective.

Run, Rogue, Run
Short Stories, October 10, 1946. 1845 Kentucky. A study in beggars’ cant, the secret language known as flash. The scholar Constiner gives the best explanation of it in this introduction to the story:

 

Dead on Arrival
Black Mask, March 1947. Luther McGavock #10. Like many pulp detective series written in this era, the McGavock stories purposefully all have basically the same plot: McGavock gets sent or hoodwinked into going to a small town, corpses begin appearing, colorful hill folk are interviewed, and McGavock will find the murderer. The enjoyment is reading about how he does it this time. They were designed to be enjoyed months apart, not binged all at once where the plot similarities show through.
Five Gray Rats
Popular Detective, May 1947. Reprinted in 5 Detective Novels, Spring 1953. A “typical small Ohio town” welcomes a veteran detective to solve a murder involving five dead rats.

 

Marauder
Country Gentleman, June, July, August & September 1947. Four-part serial. Country Gentleman was published by the same company as The Saturday Evening Post. While the Post was designed for readers living in the cities, all of the stories and ads in Country Gentlemen were geared to people living in the country on farms. Constiner would write for both of their publications. Marauder is the exciting story of 15-year-old Shep Pressy, surviving in the wild Tennessee hills in the lawless years after the Civil War.

Illustration by Paul Wenz

Bury Me Not
Black Mask, January 1948. Luther McGavock #11 of 11. This story is available online on the Pulp Magazine Archive. Most McGavock stories begin at the agency in Memphis, but this final adventure finds Luther already in a small town in action. He is there to find Zwanziger the poisoner, and there’s only one catch; Anna Maria Zwanziger died in Germany in 1811.
Louisville Pistoleer
Adventure, March 1948. When young Billie Sellew brings a cartload of hickory chairs into the marketplace at Cincinnati, he meets two con men who get him into a brush-up with the notorious duelist from Louisville, Major Chenoweth.
Kitchen Privileges
Country Gentleman, April 1948. Axel Gowker from Sharley’s Run has never seen anything quite so exquisite as his new neighbor the milliner.
Doctors’ Bottles
Woman’s Day, August 1948. 12-year-olds Joel and Edward trespass into the lair of the village desperado, Catfoot the river pirate.
A Professor to Nashville
  1. Beyond the Cedars – Country Gentleman, September 1948
  2. Walkers in the Dust – Country Gentleman, October 1948.
  3. The Fancy – Country Gentleman, November 1948.
  4. Nashville – Country Gentleman, December 1948.
Four-part serial. A professor walking a hundred miles to Nashville encounters adventure and even has to solve a murder.
Night Air
Short Stories, September 25, 1948. Storekeeper Mr. Callicott steps into a world of adventure when he is mistaken for a notorious gambler.

 

Mr. Meachum Was Too Honest
Blue Book, April 1949. Cincinnati, 1858. “This unusual story has a quality all its own”. The editors of Blue Book had not encountered the likes of Merle Constiner before. They invited him to write for them again.
Rightful Owner
Short Stories, July 1949. In 1797, a Philadelphia lawyer traveling along the lower Ohio leaves Cincinnati heading west into the network of the notorious land-and-river pirate Meason.
Deputy Cotter’s Scrapbook
Short Stories, August 1949. Tennessee Deputy Cotter gets a letter asking him to help commit a murder.
Don’t Darken My Door
The American, January 1950. Tennessee hillman Gumbo Parmalee .finds work as housekeeper for Dr. Tom Imlay. There’s only the one hitch – Gumbo knows absolutely nothing about cleaning, cooking or housekeeping.
The Rhebaville Murder
Blue Book, January 1950. Lawyer Sallee has got the Purdy boys acquitted of the Rhebaville murder. And now, as the whole town knows, the Purdys plan to kill Lawyer Sallee next. It’s up to village marshal Ed Delorac to discover the truth about that murder.
Dusty Empire
Country Gentleman, January February March April May 1950. Five-part serial. 1839 Ohio: the stagecoach is the best way to head west. And a great migration of people are heading west.  

Little Bear Lick Dugan
Country Gentleman, July 1950. Young Brack Wellington is growing up in the little town of Mount Zelmo, Ohio. One day his neighbor adopts an orphan who claims to be a two-gun dynamo from Little Bear Lick, Montana, and adventures start buzzing for the two boys.
Perilous Return
The American, July 1950. Sudden death and romance ride side by side on the Natchez Trace.
The Fixer
The American, August 1950. The further adventures of Gumbo Parmalee. When Gumbo loses Dr. Imlay’s twenty dollar bill to a con man, he heads home to Panther Ridge to get a loan from Granpappy Prosser, who is sugar-mouthed and handshaking, but buzz-saw mean.
The Lady and the Tumblers
Argosy, August 1950. Collected in THE ARGOSY BOOK OF ADVENTURE STORIES (A.S. Barnes, 1952) and in Bantam A1158 in 1953. The first Smith and Stone-Crusher story.
In 1838, wandering strong-man - pugilist Stone-Crusher and his son James Smith cross the Ohio River and head north, coming to the aid of a lady they meet on the road. 

 

The Affair at the Iron Sparrow
Blue Book, September 1950. A murder mystery set on the Atlantic coast in 1827.
Little Bear Lick Plays it Careful
Country Gentleman, May 1951.Who is this mysterious young woman suddenly in town? Could she be there to take Little Bear Lick back to the orphanage?
Hazard in Ohio
Argosy, May 1952. 1846: a young man works as an apprentice for an itinerant doctor in wild and lawless places.

 

The Great Whiskey Swindle
Argosy, October 1952. The second Smith & Stone-Crusher story. Two itinerant showmen with a magnetic attraction for trouble get into the whiskey distilling business.
The Blonde From Blood Alley
New Detective, December 1952.  Pat Gavitt is working for a construction equipment company in Cincinnati when his boss and the boss’s wife are murdered. Pat is supposed to be the fall guy, but he sets out to quickly solve the mystery himself. A fine story with only one drawback: that title does not relate to it in any way, shape or form.

 

Martin Taylor’s Enterprise
Collier’s, February 7, 1953. Cincinnati, 1851. Dapper young Martin Taylor has been fired for being the worst tobacco salesman in town, but he has ideas for a new enterprise involving all the steamboats on the Ohio River.

Little Bear Lick Finds a Family
Country Gentleman, July 1954. When Brack and Bear Lick meet two poverty-stricken twins with a stubborn father who refuses charity, they decide to lend a hand.
“But I’ll tell you something that isn’t generally realized. Dog brains are like human brains. I mean they come in grades. Highly intelligent, mediocre, and nonexistent.”
Unlucky in Love
Saturday Evening Post, October 9, 1954. Tennessee, 1868. Traveling salesman Albert Dyson runs into some trouble trying to sell sewing machines.
Too Many Girls
Saturday Evening Post, April 30. 1955. Cincinnati, 1859. Andrew has eyes for co-worker Dore. But then he meets her sister and learns the Secret Power of Attraction.
Ambush at Scissors Creek
Argosy, September 1955. 1832 Ohio. When his father falls ill, a 17-year-old boy has to get the livestock to the seaboard market in Baltimore.
The Trusting Type
Saturday Evening Post, July 14, 1956. An express company agent gets an unusual shipment for Zeller’s ranch. It’s Zeller’s new housekeeper Janey Browne, fresh from a New York City Almshouse.
The Widow Was Willing
Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1956. Adapted for television on “Cavalcade of America” in 1957. Cincinnati, 1868. Penniless author Charles Jerrold lives near a store owned by the widow Mrs. Teffy, who has her eye on Charles.
War Cry
Argosy, July 1957. A Tennessee planter fights the Shawnee
The Phantom Roundup
Argosy, November, 1957. A novice cattle rancher trying to make it on his own is up against his neighbor, who also happens to be his father-in-law.
Killer’s Rendezvous
Saturday Evening Post, May 31, 1958. Young Dayton Crandall has to get a full moneybelt back home. He spends a night in Blue Rock, where he befriends an old man and his daughter Kitty. Two killers follow him when he leaves town. 
Range Quarrel
Saturday Evening Post, October 25, 1958. The Long-Gone Kid drifts into a ranch and right into a range war. In the bunkhouse that night he tells the cowboys the story of a gunslinger who once saved his life called Wichita. What he doesn’t tell them is that he has been looking for Wichita, and today he has found him.
Dangerous Intruders
Saturday Evening Post, April 4, 1959. Americus Larkin, master blacksmith from Ohio, is on the road to New Orleans when he runs into trouble on the Natchez Trace.
Trail Trap
Saturday Evening Post, July 18, 1959. Selected for GREAT WESTERN STORIES FROM THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, edited by Julie Eisenhower, (Curtis, 1976). Texas cowboy Shelby Davis is on his first cattle drive, working for his father, heading up to the railhead in Kansas. When his father is shot, Shelby takes on the big job of selling the cattle without getting robbed.
Last Resort
Saturday Evening Post, May 28, 1960. Ohio 1846. Paggett’s Select School for Young Gentlemen needs some help from the Sylvan Glade Female Academy.
Fair Warning
Saturday Evening Post, July 2, 1960. Cincinnati 1853. A basement carpenter shop owner is hired by jewelry shop owner Miss Cora Leeds. Like his grandfather says, his goose is cooked.
The Girl From Cincinnati
Cosmopolitan, August 1960. Cincinnati’s worst thieves market in 1859. With stolen jewels in his pocket, Stephen Denby goes to work for the enchanting Melanie Aldridge.

 

A Girl on the Place
Cosmopolitan, September 1960. 16-year-old Gil Collins is not quite sure what to make of the new housekeeper’s daughter.
A Delightful Deception
Saturday Evening Post, November 19, 1960. Harpsburg, Ohio 1859.a sleepy hamlet on the Great National Road. A traveling salesman meets his match.
Murder Inn
Argosy, August 1961. 1806: young Lucian Drake from the Fincastle Fur Company of Cincinnati rides into Kentucky to become the apprentice to the company’s best fur buyer. But when the buyer is murdered at the first inn they stop at, Lucian has to learn the fur trade fast.
Lady From Boston
Cosmopolitan, February 1962. Margaret and Barry discover an old book detailing a love story from 150 years earlier.
The Great Molasses Love Affair
Saturday Evening Post, March 17, 1962. In 1821, the Boston Spice & Sugar Company deals with a stolen shipload of molasses from Santo Domingo.
Gold and the Amateur Spy
Saturday Evening Post, June 2, 1962. Boston, 1818. Five seaman are on trial for piracy and murder.

Non-fiction
Pioneer Days: My Favorite Story Setting
The Author & Journalist, Vol 41, No 9, 1956.
The Magazine Short Story
The Writer, June 1960.
The First Hundred Words are the Hardest
The Writer, November 1962.

 

II. Books

HEARSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR
Phoenix Press, 1952. Book version of the four-part serial Death on a Party Line from Short Stories, 1946. Reprinted in softcover as DEATH ON A PARTY LINE, Front Page Mystery #29 (Shakespeare Head Press, Australia, February 1953) (shown on Home page).
LAST STAND AT ANVIL PASS
Crest 161, February 1957. Paperback original. Store owner-rancher John Sennett sees a range war beginning, with his ranch at Anvil Pass in a key position. His flighty girlfriend Dove thinks he should walk away from all the trouble. But he won’t.

1st hardcover edition is the British:

Mills & Boon Limited, 1959.

 

UK paperback edition is Corgi SW888, 1960.

Corgi cover art was re-used on the 2013 Center Point Large Print edition. There is also a 2014 Magna Large Print edition available.

 

THE FOURTH GUNMAN
Ace D328, December 1958. Ace Double with SLICK ON THE DRAW by Tom West. Reprinted as Ace Double 24925, same covers.
Saloon owner George Netfield realizes four hired gunmen have arrived in town to rustle cattle. He gets rid of two of them, Spunky and Buttermilk, and sends Buck, the third gunman, packing. But the elusive fourth gunman is preparing to take George out when a grizzled old gunfighter called The Turkey Creek Kid arrives to help.

Reprinted as Ace 0-441-24926-6 in 1980. The new cover art was re-used for Charter 0-441-24927-2, 1985:

Reprinted in the UK by Wildside Press in 2014.

 

SHORT-TRIGGER MAN
Ace D-588, October 1964. Former gunman Watts Denning is working as a bartender when his boss is mysteriously murdered. Watts hunts down the killers like a gunslinging detective.

 

Reprinted as Ace 76147, with new John Duillo cover art. Ace Tall Twin Western with OUTRAGE AT BEARSKIN FORKS (shown below).

 

WOLF ON HORSEBACK
Ace M-110, February 1965. Ace Double with BUSHWHACK BRAND by Tom West. Unemployed for the winter, cowboy Kyle Fentress drifts into town and finds work at the general store. But when there is a murder, Kyle thinks he knows who the killer is and begins his investigation.

Reprinted in an Ace Double with KILLER’S CORRAL, Ace 44220-X, 1981.

Reprinted in UK hardcover by Sagebrush Large Print in 2011.

From Constiner’s bio: “A frequent contributor to the action magazines of the forties, he became notable for the authenticity of his backgrounds and the ease of his narration. Not limited to one type of market, his material has ranged through all varieties of writing… A native of Monroe, Ohio, he holds a Master’s degree from Vanderbilt.”

GUNS AT Q CROSS
Ace M-118, May 1965. Ace Double with THE TOUGHEST TOWN IN THE TERRITORY by Tom West.
When Texas cattle rancher Stiles Gilmore arrives in Idaho to sell his herd to the Q Cross outfit, someone tries to ambush him. He discovers cattle rustlers are secretly running a big operation at Q Cross.

Reprinted as Ace 81861. Ace Double with THE TOUGHEST TOWN IN THE TERRITORY by Tom West.

 

 

Reprinted as Ace 30806. Reprinted by Sagebrush Large Print in 2016.

 

MEETING AT THE MERRY FIFER
Norton, April 1966. Young adult hardcover.  Kirkus Review: “like a side trip down a back alley of mid-nineteenth century middle-western social history.” A 15-year-old country boy finds work and adventure at the Merry Fifer Inn in Cincinnati.

 

TOP GUN FROM THE DAKOTAS
Ace G-573, April 1966. Ace Double with RATTLESNAKE RANGE by Tom West.
Hyde Whalen, a trouble-shooting cattle company man arrives in Montana and enlists a foreman and a stableman to help him wipe out the trouble.

 

Reprinted as Ace 81735 with KILLER’S CORRAL. Reprinted as Ace 81754, 1980, with that cover re-used on Charter 81721-1 in 1986.

 

OUTRAGE AT BEARSKIN FORKS
Ace F-401, August 1966. Cattle buyer Charles Wheeler returns home to find his gold stolen and his son murdered. Three men have just escaped from jail, but when he hunts them down he learns the story is not yet over.

 

Reprinted as Ace 76147. Cover by John Duillo, with SHORT-TRIGGER MAN (shown above). Also reprinted by Sagebrush / Ulverscroft Large Print in 2015.

 

RAIN OF FIRE
Ace G-607, December 1966. Ace Double with BITTER BRAND by Tom West. In a complete reversal of the previous stories, store owner Joe Fane loves guns, but when gunslingers come to town he does not hunt them down, he joins them. The lovable but homicidal gunslingers Arapaho and Crezavent are very funny, and they lead Joe on a wild series of adventures and shootouts as a fight for the control of one corrupt little town erupts.
Reprinted by Sagebrush Large Print in 2012.

 

THE ACTION AT REDSTONE CREEK
Ace G-638, June 1967. Ace Double with A TIME TO SHOOT IT OUT by Edwin Booth. Broke and out of work, Mark Townsend is hired for a tracking job by a man named Teague. When Teague is killed, Townsend continues working the job (why is never explained) and gets in on a range war with Teague’s brother. The purpose for all this is finally made clear at the end when Mark is appointed deputy. This is a story about the birth of a lawman.

 

TWO PISTOLS SOUTH OF DEADWOOD
Ace G-674, November 1967. Ace Double with NO MAN’S BRAND by William Vance. Gun artist Kinney Lampson has put away his guns and works as a trapper. But when the bank that held all his earnings is robbed by Wolverine Gambrell, Kinney puts his guns back on and hunts down the bank robbers. On the road he befriends John Gatling. The two become fast friends, but Gatling has a secret, he is a member of Gambrell’s gang. The teaming up of Kinney & Gatling is a great achievement, and I wish Constiner had written more adventures featuring these two.

 

Reprinted as Ace 58601. Ace Double with NO MAN’S BRAND by William Vance.

 

Reprinted as Ace 83450.

 

KILLERS’ CORRAL
Ace G-705, March 1968. Ace Double with THE LONG WIRE by Barry Cord.
When a road company boss is murdered, his foreman Rush Ledderman hunts the down the killers. He learns they were hired by friends and neighbors as the investigation leads him back home where he started.

 

Reprinted as KILLER’S CORRAL, Belmont BT 51237, no date c.1976. This is the only Belmont Constiner I have seen and I have no clue why it appeared between the Ace original and Ace reprints.

Reprinted as KILLER’S CORRAL, Ace 44220-X, 1981 with WOLF ON HORSEBACK (shown above).

Reprinted as KILLER’S CORRAL, Ace 81735 with TOP GUN FROM THE DAKOTAS (shown above).

 

 
THE REBEL COURIER AND THE REDCOATS
Meredith, August 1968. Young adult hardcover. 1780: 16-year-old Clay Henderson works with the rebels against the British.

 

THE FOUR FROM GILA BEND
Ace G-755, October 1968. Ace Double with TRAIL OF THE SKULLS by Wayne C. Lee. When Sheriff Bill Ferrine is tricked into killing a man from Farley who gets off the train, he asks his friend, Farley Sheriff Burt Anders, for information. But when four men from Gila Bend gun Anders down, Ferrine becomes the detective who solves the mystery.

 

Reprinted as FOUR FROM GILA BEND with DEATH WAITS AT DAKINS STATION, Ace 24909.

Reprinted as FOUR FROM GILA BEND, Ace 24907-8.

Reprinted for Sagebrush Large Print (UK) in 2018.

 

THE MAN WHO SHOT “THE KID”
Ace Double 76900, May 1969. Ace Double with THE SKULL RIDERS by Dean Owen. It’s only a theory, but my theory is Constiner was assigned this title and cover and then wrote a parody of it. For this is not Billy the Kid, it’s the Sangre de Christo Kid. And we are not in Lincoln County, New Mexico, we are in the next county south. And it’s not Pat Garrett, it’s Dave Wheatly. The Kid gets killed on page one and is rarely ever mentioned again. And the thirty hired killers on the cover blurb are not real and never show up, they are part of a fictitious story spread by the villainous Castleberry. When a range war threatens to break out between Castleberry and beautiful young Miss Parthy Jaynes, Wheatly solves the mystery: the range war is not real either. Something else is going on.

 

DEATH WAITS AT DAKINS STATION
Ace 14195, January 1970. Ace Double with RANSOME’S DEBT by Kyle Hollingshead. As much a Constiner-style mystery as a Western. On the prod cowboy Little Brady Willet is hired to take a message to a man at Dakins Station. All hell breaks loose when Willet arrives and finds himself in the middle of a range war.

 

Reprinted with FOUR FROM GILA BEND in Ace 24909 (shown above).

 

 Reprinted as Ace 14180-3.

Reprinted by Gunsmoke Westerns Large Print (UK) in 2012.

 

SUMATRA ALLEY
Nelson, March 1971. Young adult hardcover. 1765 New York City: 17-year-old Brad Agnew is asked by the British to spy on the Sons of Liberty. Brad knows the Sons of Liberty, including his benefactor-employer, want him to counterspy.

 

STEEL-JACKET
Ace 78580, January 1972. Cover art by George Gross. Born hardcase Joe Fugate accepts a job guiding beautiful young Amy Dennis across the wild Oklahoma Indian Territory.

There was a 1978 UK hardcover by Severn House that I have never seen.
Reprinted as Ace Charter 78569-7. Re-uses the same great George Gross cover art.
Reprinted by Sagebrush Large Print in 2020.

THE COMPLEAT ADVENTURES OF THE DEAN
The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2004. Introduction by Robert Weinberg. Out of print.

 

THE COMPLETE CASES OF THE DEAN Volume 1
Altus Press, 2016 (shown above)
LET THE DEAD ALONE; The Complete Black Mask Cases of Luther McGavock, Book 1.
Black Mask, 2020. Introduction by Evan Lewis (shown above)
THE HOUND WITH THE GOLDEN EYE; The Complete Black Mask Cases of Luther McGavock, Book 2. Black Mask, 2023 (shown above)

Merle Constiner in Blue Book in 1949 with his 150-pound Newfoundland, Lancelot Dulac.

“A professional writer writes every day whether he feels like it or not.”
                                                      -Merle Constiner

Black Mask Canada, October 1945. The Canadian editions used different cover art.