Merle Constiner (1901-1979) was an American pulp author who wrote both detective fiction and Westerns. His main detective characters were Wardlow Rock (The Dean) and Ben Matthews. He was born in Ohio and married a woman named Susannah in 1934. He spent some years in Tennessee, where he attended Vanderbilt University, before moving back to Ohio permanently in his thirties. Constiner was a heavy smoker, and suffered a stroke in 1970 which curtailed his writing activity.
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