K.C. Constantine: The Mysteries of Greensburg

by William Severini Kowinski 

Every December I resolve that this year I won’t expend the time and effort to look up notable deaths of the past twelve months to write about the people I remember, as I have for some years past on various blogs.  Failing that, I tell myself, I will restrict my research to the more prominent names assembled by major newspapers and magazines.  

But every December, including in 2023, I still find myself trolling through Wikipedia’s comprehensive rolls of hundreds of deceased soccer stars and those in other fields around the world who made the cut.  I do so partly because every year, a name surprises me—someone whose death means something to me, but I had not known of it until then.

  Last December, that was the writer K.C. Constantine.  His series of 18 police procedurals began in 1972 with The Rocksburg Railroad Murders, and concluded with the just published Another Day’s Pain in April 2024.  All of them are set in his fictional Rocksburg, Pennsylvania.

 Despite consistently laudatory reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post and other prestigious places, he was never very well known (and therefore, his death was not noted in their year-end summaries.)  A blurb on the back of his final novel by mystery writer Ken Bruen sums it up: “…a great and ferocious talent who was unjustly ignored.” 

 K.C. Constantine was a pseudonym, and for most of his career his real name was not generally known.  But for part of that time I knew it.   Carl Constantine Kosak died at the age of 88 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where he’d lived while writing this book series, and where I was born, grew up, and returned as a visitor and temporary resident. 

I hasten to add that I did not know him, and even after I knew who he was, I never met him.  I learned of his books in the 1980s, fittingly enough, in the very bar he immortalized as Muscotti’s in the novels.  A newspaper reporter friend told me of the series, and that it was basically set in Greensburg, though I didn’t get the impression he’d read many himself.

  I found five or six of his novels in the Greensburg Public Library.  I was excited by what I read, and amazed that nobody in town—including my otherwise well-connected acquaintances-- seemed to know about them, and therefore, about him. And it was very clear from those novels that it was Greensburg he was chiefly writing about.

 The Wikipedia entry on Constantine asserts the novels are set in a version of McKees Rocks, another western Pennsylvania town, where Kosak grew up. There are elements of McKees Rocks represented—notably the neighborhood of the Bottoms, called the Flats in the novels, as well as other places, real and imaginary.  But basically, it’s Greensburg. That fact is now acknowledged in the author’s bio with the last novel. 

 That an author who is known elsewhere could remain unknown in Greensburg was not exactly news to me, but that Constantine was writing police procedurals about the very city that was blind to him did seem strange. So I continued my search for the author’s identity, and eventually found my answer, once again, at the model for Muscotti’s.

 Facing Pennsylvania Avenue (called State Street in the novels), on a downhill slope of West Otterman St., there was a bar and grill called the Rialto since 1933. (It’s name possibly had something to do with the long gone Rialto movie theatre nearby.) This had been the location of one tavern or another for much longer, going back to when it was close to the trail between Fort Pitt on the Point in Pittsburgh to the west and Fort Ligonier in the mountains to the east. The place that became Greensburg was a rest or overnight stop , so it was at first a settlement of taverns and inns. According to a town history, one early tavern on the precise location of the Rialto had walls three feet thick to repel arrows from hostile Indians.  Later the trail became the stagecoach road, and still later, the railroad right of way.

 Into the early 1980s, the Rialto was owned by a man named Dom, just as Muscotti’s is.  It so happened that one of his daughters was a high school classmate of mine. After Dom died, she renovated the place (which had become pretty seedy) and I happened to see her there one day after it had reopened as more of a cafe restaurant.  I mentioned the novels and she said that she had recently met the man who’d written them, after her father’s funeral.  He tried to explain how much her father meant to him.  He’d introduced himself as Carl Kosak.

 By then I was living in Pittsburgh and writing a column for an alternative weekly there.  Talking to the paper’s CFO who coincidentally was a friend from Greensburg, I proudly confided that I learned K.C. Constantine’s identity but wasn’t going to reveal it, when she laughed and said, “Oh, you mean Carl Kosak.”  It turns out that she had been a babysitter for his son (and once kept him up late to watch Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on TV.) 

 So I wrote a column about the books of K.C. Constantine titled “The Mysteries of Greensburg.”  (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had been a recent best-selling novel for Michael Chabon.)  I described my search for the author but, true to my word, did not divulge his name.

 Some days later I received a letter from Carl Kosak, thanking me for keeping his secret, and correcting me on a few points, notably on the quality of his previous publisher, which he’d abandoned.  His new book—Joey’s Case— would be nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for best novel of the year, the closest Constantine got to official recognition.

Along the way I learned that Kosak had taught at Greensburg’s Seton Hill College (though only for a few years, it turns out) and worked at the Greensburg Tribune Review (as a copy editor, I learned later.) Beyond that I knew nothing.

 I soon moved more than 3,000 miles away, but over the years I kept an eye out for new K.C. Constantine titles as well as copies of older ones.  After learning of his death I began reading from what I had, and my rekindled enthusiasm inspired me to complete my collection with what I could find online, and read them all, more or less in order.

 My collection reflects an interesting publishing history of both obscurity and interest.  I have seven hardback first editions (though one is a discard from the Burlingame CA Public Library), but also a couple of editions from England: The Man Who Liked To Look At Himself (1973) in an Allison & Busby American Crime Series paperback (I acquired this at a university bookstore sale—back when university bookstores actually sold books), and a Coronet paperback Double Detective combo of The Blank Page (1974) and A Fix Like This (1975), which claims to be the first appearance of these books in the UK.  (However I also have an apparently rare hardback of The Blank Page from Saturday Review Press, its US publisher.)

 I’ve got a David Godine paperback of The Rocksburg Railroad Murders (1972) with a 1983 afterword by the author, a Penguin paperback of Always A Body To Trade (1983), Warner Books/Mysterious Press paperbacks of Bottom Line Blues (1993) and Family Values (1997), an advanced reading copy of Brush Back (1998) and a Thorndike Press large print edition of Blood Mud (1998.)

 This recent reading of the Rocksburg series—one after the other, over the first months of the year—reinforced two impressions of that 1980s reading of the first half of the group.  We all know the cliché of “the page-turner,” the book you can’t put down.  In my many years of all kinds of reading, this cliché has seldom been as true for me as it was reading Constantine.  I almost invariably found myself blowing past the time I’d expected to read at one sitting—and it was seldom because I needed to know whodunit.

 The second is the eerie reading experience of knowing exactly where many of these places are that I’m reading about, and even the people particular characters seem based on, or are meant to represent.  This knowledge, while not absolutely unique, has to be rare. I mean, I’m not having an experience in common with millions of New Yorkers, or thousands familiar with southern California or the Bay Area.  I personally know no one who has read this series and knows Greensburg, especially from the 1970s and 80s.  The fictional and the real universe keep crossing in and out of each other, but this is not an experience I can readily share.

 Of course, Rocksburg exists only in the pages of Constantine’s novels. Its placement in western Pennsylvania is somewhat different, and somewhat impossible. But the Greensburg I know is clearly there as a model and a source, giving physical form to many of the scenes I am reading and imagining, as well as supplying aspects of varying proportions of some characters.

S. Main St. Greensburg 1977

 It’s there from the beginning, in the Rocksburg Railroad Murders. The locations of the county court house, city hall and police headquarters are the same as in downtown Greensburg.  The location and layout of the train station is the same, though by 1970 (when this novel takes place, by the internal evidence of the outcome of the National League baseball playoffs that becomes a plot point) this grand old station had been long closed, though trains still stopped in Greensburg (I took many Broadway Limiteds from there to New York in the 1980s.) 

 Even the location of the hippie store on “State Street” (Pennsylvania Avenue) suggests the health food store that was still there in the early 80s, in the below- ground floor of the old Rappe/Greensburger/General Greene hotel.  

Some Greensburg history with which I was personally familiar also appears.  In The Blank Page (1974), Constantine conflates several local coal barons families, but writes about the one that maintained their sumptuous residence in “Rocksburg” after all the others moved on, (some far away, some to Pittsburgh and some in estates east towards Ligonier, where they had a hand in causing the great Johnstown Flood.)  The remnants of that family, called the “Summers” in this novel, held on to its façade of wealth into the 1950s, but suddenly that pretense vanished.  The first sign, Constantine writes, was that the chauffeur was dismissed.  I remember tales of such a family in Greensburg (the Jamisons), because that chauffeur lived next door.  I'd even seen the car.

 Recognizable Greensburg people also form the basis for characters in these novels.  The combination of characters and locale got downright dizzying in Upon Some Midnight Clear (1985): Westmoreland Hospital, Greengate Mall and the cinder block bunker that housed the Greensburg Tribune-Review newspaper, are all given different names but accurately described. Some downtown street names are exactly the same, so I knew the precise location where a mugging is alleged to have occurred.

 Meanwhile, three major characters seem closely based on well-known Greensburg figures of the time: There’s  “hard charging and outspoken” fire chief Ed Hutchinson (as described in another Greensburg history) who is the model for fire chief Ed Sitko in this and several other Rocksburg novels.  Ruth Love (called Mary Hart) was a prominent and controversial columnist for the Greensburg Tribune Review, particularly in the early days after it was bought by Richard Scaife, known then and now for his wealth and hard right wing politics.  Besides purported news stories, she wrote the rambling and often scurrilous and self-righteous column Lovelines (called Hartbeats in the novel.)

 Constantine provides a more sympathetic portrayal of that newspaper’s veteran editor, called Tom Murray in the novel.  I’m almost certain he is based on Tom Aikens, the editor of that era who I met and admired.  In pre-Scaife days, in the late 60s or early 70s, I recall Aikens actually writing an editorial opposing the American war in Vietnam.  Aikens, like Murray, died young. In researching him for this post, I found very little available on the Internet.  Constantine’s portrait of him thus becomes his most lasting memorial. 

In review excerpts dotting the novel covers, Constantine is praised for his mastery of dialect in dialogue.  This has several components, or layers.  There’s ethnic dialogue of typical western Pennsylvania immigrants and their descendants, mostly Italian. This I find familiar, though probably disappearing, if not a 20^th century artifact.

  Black dialogue seems more urban to me.  But there is a western Pennsylvania way of talking common to all ethnic and racial groups—at least in these decades—that is accurate, if somewhat exaggerated.  It reminds me of playwright August Wilson, widely praised for his dialogue, though actor Roscoe Lee Browne mused that neither he nor the other black actors in a Wilson play recognized its talk from their own communities.  I'd guess it's a specifically western Pennsylvania approach to language as spoken in the black community of Wilson's youth (for as New Orleans-bred Branford Marsalis noted, black argot is regional) plus the playwright's artful stylization.  It’s writing, after all, and this seems true also of Constantine.

 Western Pennsylvania retains some words and expressions that other places don’t—like “nebby” (meaning nosy)  and "slippy" (meaning slippery) which are still used in at least northern England (if the ITV series Vera is anything to go by) , and “redd up” (lightly clean up, usually the house) which I ran across in Dickens.

  But there are differences even within the region.  Pittsburgh, currently proud of its unique expressions, has made a fetish of the word pronounced “yinz,” which means the plural “you.”  But to my ear Greensburg (just thirty or so miles away) harbored a slight variation: the pronunciation was more like  "yunz"-- closer to "you-uns" and so more clearly derived from “you all.”  And sure enough, in Constantine’s last novel, Another Day's Pain (2024) he gave the Greensburg version, which he spelled “youns.”  He casually employs a number of other expressions rooted in this region, just as a matter of course in the dialogue.   

 Some of the plots also have familiar elements from vaguely recalled news stories, but as a whole the series makes me feel I led a sheltered life there. There was a certain harshness as well as warmth to the place, and I recognize the meanness and excesses of some characters, but fortunately I didn’t have to deal with very many as extreme as appear often in these pages. 

Still, I feel a kinship with the author as well, based on those shared streets and people.  In his 1983 afterword to his first novel, The Rocksburg Railroad Murders, Constantine describes its origin: buying a newspaper one Sunday morning at a particular newsstand, he saw rows of paperback mysteries, which the proprietor told him just about fly off the racks.  He’s been struggling with his attempts at literary fiction, and wonders if he could write one of those and actually be read.  On his drive home he passed the train station, and he had the idea for this novel that starts the series.

 I know exactly what newsstand he’s talking about—on Otterman Street in Greensburg—and I’ll bet he was there to pick up the Sunday Pittsburgh Press and maybe the New York Times, for it was the only place it could be obtained in the pre-Internet days (though whether it was even there in the early 70s I'm not sure.  In any case, that’s where I got my Sunday Times later in the decade, and eventually signed up for a reserved copy.  Maybe Kosak did, too.  When I came for it every Sunday, it was on a separate stack, possibly with names attached. If so, considering how close the names Kozak and Kowinski are in the alphabet, there’s a chance that for at least a few years my copy was just on top of his. Which is only one of the ways our ships may have passed in the night, on the streets and buildings of Greensburg, PA.  

 All of this adds another dimension to my reading experience, which is a delight but also has some weight for me. What I share with all readers however is even greater: the experience and appreciation of a unique literary voice in K.C. Constantine.  That’s the subject of my next post.