This is the second of two posts on K.C. Constantine. The first looks at origins of his fictional town of Rocksburg in Greensburg, Pa., where we both lived, partly at the same time, including some years that are those in the novels.
His publisher once called him the greatest unknown writer in America. It's a logical impossibility, of course: if the writers are truly unknown, how would you know which is the greatest? But it makes a point anyway. K.C. Constantine's obscurity is not based on merit, and should not last.
“K.C. Constantine’s crime novels are among the best in American literature,” said a San Diego Union-Tribune review. An Los Angeles Times Book Review piece called him “A superb writer and social chronicler,” and the New York Times “ a marvelous writer.” Washington Post Book World claimed he “writes some of the best American regional fiction appearing today.” Of these novels main protagonist, a Boston Globe reviewer wrote: "Balzic is one of the great characters in contemporary fiction.” Notice the lack of qualifier--not mystery or police procedural fiction, just "contemporary fiction."
Over the years the reviews in major US and UK publications have praised Constantine’s novels as not only as among the best in crime fiction, but for their literary style and quality. Yet relatively few readers know about him, even after more than fifty years since his books began, and now a year after his death, as well as shortly after his last novel was published.
Part of the reason has to be that for most of his career he insisting on remaining no more than a pseudonym. In this publicity-crazed age, there were no book jacket photos, interviews, book tours, television appearances or feature stories. (There were stories about how zealously he guarded his identity, and some of them may even have been true.) An anonymous author living in an obscure and culturally isolated little town, in an unlauded and decidedly unromantic part of America—not a recipe for fame.
Carl Constantine Kosak was born in 1934, and grew up in the Bottoms neighborhood of McKees Rocks, a small town within the Pittsburgh metro area. His father, an immigrant probably from modern-day Latvia, was an artist and founding member of the Pittsburgh Artists Guild. He painted murals and also did commercial work and design for clients such as the Kaufmann department store family in Pittsburgh, including on their famous Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater.
But the dominant figure in the Kosak household was Carl’s grandfather, according to some cryptic comments the writer offered in an afterword to a paperback edition of his first novel, The Rocksburg Railroad Murders. Carl developed a “murderous hatred” of him. He died when Carl was 12. After asking to see the body to make sure, “I danced around chanting ‘He’s dead, he’s dead’ until I fell down exhausted. When you hate someone and he dies, it’s a wonderful feeling.”
Carl was an honor student at Stowe Township High School, as well as a star baseball player, good enough to be offered a minor league contract. He played for several teams in the South before returning to Pennsylvania to attend Westminster College, a small liberal arts college affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in New Wilmington, a town about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh.
After his stint in the Marines, Kosak returned to Westminster College, where he met Linda Tweedy, who grew up in Greensburg. They married in 1962.
While in the Marines, Kosak had begun to write seriously. He did well enough to be accepted at the Iowa Writers Workshop (this had to be the early to mid 60s, a crucial half decade or so before I was there.) Kosak and his wife could afford to be there only a year, but his son said he kept in touch with some of his teachers. I’m curious who they were. R.V. Casill? Richard Yates? Kurt Vonnegut? He mentions writer and California teacher Robert V. Williams several times in his afterword, so he must have encountered him somewhere. In any case, he seems to have gotten more out of the Iowa workshop than I did.
Their son was born in 1964, and at some point they moved to Greensburg, where Carl worked construction, and eventually taught English and/or Creative Writing at Seton Hill College for four years, reputedly forced to leave because he wouldn’t pursue an advanced degree.
He became a proofreader/copy editor at the Greensburg Tribune-Review for an unknown period. He may have been able to write full time after 1993. He believed in the craft of writing, passing on his copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style to his son. (They also enjoyed conversations about Star Trek.) He and Linda lived in Greensburg and remained married until her death in 2018.
That’s about all that I’ve found in the public record (the K.C. Constantine wikipedia page is currently a disgrace.) There seem actually to be more biographical details about his wife available, thanks to the obituary that Carl obviously wrote.
Some aspects of Balzic’s biography and the character itself would change slightly as the series went on (he went from drinking beer to enjoying wine), while other elements were clarified and augmented, but from the start it’s Mario Balzic who caught the attention of readers, and particularly in the many laudatory reviews.
Right away, Balzic was unusual. For one thing, he didn’t carry a handgun, because “cops kill too many people, if you ask me.” But he takes his modified Springfield rifle to the range every week to practice bringing down a man without killing him. He’s restrained his officers as well, with the result that nobody has been shot by any of them since he became Chief. “I’m prouder of that than anything.”
Balzic isn’t idealistic and he’s also not entirely cynical, nor he is totally innocent, or erudite and all-knowing. He curses a lot and screw up pretty badly at least once in every story. But he knows people. He knows that a 90 year old old woman calls police headquarters once a month to demand an officer take her complaint in person, so that she can eventually persuade him to go to the market for her because she can’t get around herself anymore, or the reason that an old man insists on complaining in police headquarters about his garbage pickup rather than walk to the second floor of City Hall to the right department is that he’s not supposed to climb stairs.
These daily details surround some twisted crimes, and painful investigations. But beginning with this first novel, usually something psychological is involved—in this case, a killer with a serious but concealed mental illness.
Gradually we learn that Mario Balzic was born in or around 1926, joined the Marines out of high school (eventually named as Central Catholic) and saw horrific combat on the island of Iwo Jima in the late stages of World War II in the Pacific. He joined the Rocksburg Police immediately after returning.
Mario had a Serbian father who was killed in a coal mining accident, and in the first few novels, his Italian mother lives with him and his wife, Ruth. They have two daughters. As is common in at least western Pennsylvania marriages of mixed ethnicity that include an Italian, it is the Italian side that is the family culture.
Where did Mario come from? He’s almost a decade older that the author, who had no daughters. Despite Balzic’s dominant Italian heritage, Carl Kosak had none. This is intriguing to me, what with the many Italian American characters in the novels, and even the adoption of a pen name that suggests Italian (I knew of Italian American families in Greensburg named Constantine—I think I am vaguely related to one.)
K.C. Constantine asked the general question about Balzic’s origins and answered it at length and very indirectly in the aforementioned afterword. The short answer is that Balzic is a predominantly imagined character, drawing some qualities from authority figures the author admired (possibly in the Marines) but also reacting against qualities in authority figures (mostly in law enforcement) he detested.
Although I suspect the author might have denied it, that “Balzic” is only a letter away from “Balzac” probably isn’t a coincidence. The 19th century French novelist is known for creating complex characters from all segments of society in a realistic portrait of his time and place. In his own way, K.C. Constantine has done the same in this series of novels. Though at times it seems to me the character’s name could just as well have been Mario Dickins.
For my own convenience if nothing else, I’ve divided these books into three phases. The early third were fairly short and came out a year or two apart. The Man Who Liked To Look At Himself (1973) is told mostly in pitch-perfect dialogue, as Balzic is present when a body buried for years is exposed, and must follow the twisted trail of an unsavory murder while dealing with the petty bureaucratic and political demands of being Chief. His character still has some jagged edges that get smoothed later on. In particular, he tells (for effect presumably) a story with racist language that would have been shocking even in the early 1970s.
The Blank Page (1974) shifts milieu slightly to a community college, especially a teacher/poet and his protégé, that perhaps draws on the author’s experience at the Iowa Workshop and maybe his teaching gig at Seton Hill. The murder of a young woman student who was traumatized by an earlier event is especially poignant. It calls to mind a somewhat similar childhood trauma suffered by Linda Kosak, as described in her published obituary as a form of PTSD. “Despite the best efforts of well-trained and well-meaning therapists, that emotional hand grenade…exploded as many as three times a month for the next 65 years.”
A Fix Like This (1975) settles into the family and neighborhood violence that characterizes the series, including the desperation of people on the edge of survival. The coal mines have mostly closed, and as the series continues the jolt of jobs and entire industries disappearing to distant lands that began in the mid-70s begins to contribute its devastating effect.
Critics often make much of this aspect, which tends to make Constantine seem like an anthropologist examining an alien culture. But as someone who grew up and lived for a time in this part of the country, other cultural—and human--elements are at least as important in these stories.
Another theme that’s here from the start is Balzic’s battles with a casually corrupt political establishment, which includes law enforcement. Balzic has made his own compromises as well. Through the “connected” Dom Muscotti, he’s set rules to keep the illegal numbers games clean, and in exchange for allowing that gambling enterprise to persist, the crime bosses will keep drugs and prostitution out of his jurisdiction.
When I first read The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes (1982) I was especially impressed by a dialogue of several pages in which the reader is taken step by step through the delicate intricacies and strategies Balzic employs to extract information, while simultaneously presenting a portrait of a psychologically abused working class woman who is slowly bringing to consciousness all her repressed feelings and motives. This is when I knew a literary artist was at work.
Always a Body To Trade (1983) was longer and maybe a bit more ambitious while still taut and fast-moving, using the innocence of a young and too eager new Mayor to reveal more complexities and corruption—another reason that Balzic affirms his belief in the rights of the accused. But to me it was his next novel, Upon Some Midnight Clear (1985) that gave Constantine’s a larger canvas for his next several novels, without moving the focus away from Rocksburg.
By this time, Hill Street Blues was into his network run, with Homicide: Life on the Streets just ahead. Some of the police headquarters chaos described in this novel reminds me of some of the qualities of those shows. The story he tells, with some major characters based on Greensburg people I knew about, took on the twisted fairy tale quality of its Christmastime setting. There’s more description of place, and more of Balzic’s inner life.
Joey’s Case (1988), his first novel with Mysterious Press, the publisher of the rest of the series, was also his most formally recognized, nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best mystery novel of the year. By this time, the Constantine novels had collected high praise in Great Britain as well as North America. But his anonymity probably hurt his chances for a wider readership in this celebrity-centered age. Still, if it enabled him to write and do so more freely, it was probably worth it to him, and now to us. Because we have these books.
Sunshine Enemies (1990) involves the death of Mario’s mother, who his wife Ruth considers her best friend. This first whiff of mortality and change in Balzic’s private life is a foretaste of more to come. There’s change in Rocksburg, too, as Dom Muscotti admits he has no say anymore over organized crime in town, and a new day is heralded by a sad little porn shop out on the highway. (I remember one just like it appearing in the 1980s outside Greensburg.)
For more than a decade, Rocksburg’s downtown has been hollowed out, mostly due to the two shopping malls on the highway just east and west of city limits, while city committees spin their wheels with loopy ideas for revival. (Again, exactly Greensburg’s situation. One such organization, called Go Greensburg!, debated saying something nasty to me for what I wrote about the town in my book The Malling of America.)
The resulting cratering of tax revenue has led to a vastly reduced Rocksburg police force, and an aging Chief Balzic finds himself doing the work of a patrolman to cover for the summer vacations of the few officers left. Out at Rocksburg’s version of Greensburg’s Greengate Mall, he has a flashback in the parking lot, suddenly taking him back to Iowa Jima. It’s not the last such episode in the book.
There is of course a spiraling crime story, but this novel is notable also for a couple of other things. First is the poignant plight of Mario’s wife Ruth, who wants a life and an identity outside the house, but is stunned to find she has no readily identified job skills. The other is the very long dialogue between Balzic and one of Rocksburg’s colorful barflies named Myuskin, who turns out to be a respected and translated novelist with nine books almost nobody in Rocksburg knows about, and he’s broke and nearly broken. Myuskin goes into a long complicated rant about how unfair it is for libraries to lend out his books without compensation. It has dramatic impact, since he’s doing it with a gun in his hand, but it’s hard not to hear the author’s voice.
Cranks and Shadows (1995) involves something I vaguely remember from Greensburg: the Fire Chief (here called Ed Sitko) who organizes a privately funded paramilitary group in response to 1980s terrorist incidents. While Chief Balzic deals with more budget cuts and the prospect of laying off more officers, he learns more about the politics of power and money in his little town. He learns it up close and personal when he is forced into retirement, after 24 years as Chief.
The novel and Balzic’s career ends with two supposed retirement dinners. One is an ill-attended and insulting testimonial by the very public officials and private powers that forced him out, which he quickly observes is meant to humiliate him, and which he just as quickly leaves. The other is a huge, raucous party given by the people of the neighborhoods he served, with food and drink all donated in appreciation. This party adds a rare and surprising note to the series: unmitigated joy. (The author also namechecks some actual well-known western Pennsylvania musicians of the time, including Kenny Blake, who played saxophone on my one and only record—but that’s another story.)
Judging from the book sleeve copy, even the publisher expected this to be the last of the series. It did end a major part of it, but there was a third phase yet to come, with six more novels in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and a final one published in 2024.
A now-retired Mario Balzic is the protagonist of two of them. In Family Values (1997), Balzic is hired by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to look into a crime in a very rural county some distance from Rocksburg. The back cover summary mentions “Balzic must enter his own heart of darkness,” and there is some of that quality to it, as well as grotesque characters that could be out of the horror genre, especially when Balzic faces a psychopathic and truly corrupt police chief who made a practice of abusing the power they both had.
Blood Mud (1998) finds Balzic employed by lawyer Panagios Valcanas (one of the handful of characters that appear in most of the Balzic novels) to investigate thefts at a mall gun store (chronicling as well the deterioration of the soon-to-be defunct Greengate Mall) for an insurance company. This seemingly quick job gets much more complicated, especially when Balzic has what he’s told is “a cardiac event.” This is meticulously described, including his treatment at the county hospital (based on the same hospital where my brother-in-law got similar treatment just a few days before I read this account), and his edgy feelings of vulnerability and mortality afterwards.
Balzic seems to be sinking in fear and guilt, certain he’s damned for what he failed to do, but one of his daughters is giving him books, including some on meditation, and he’s becoming an advocate. (Besides the Strunk and White, the other book the author gave to his son was Zen and the Art of Archery.)
As far back as A Fix Like This, a promising young officer named Ruggiero Carlucci (called “Rugsy” at first, and then “Rugs”) was introduced, and as a detective he soon became essential to Balzic’s investigations. After Mario’s retirement, he was the main protagonist of three novels: Good Sons (1996), Brushback (1998)—which involves a minor league pitcher, perhaps drawing on Carl Kozak’s youthful memories—and Grievance (2000.)
In 2002 came Saving Room for Dessert which follows three protagonists from the Rockburg police: Robert Canoza, James Reseta (on the force in Balzic’s time) and William Rayford, Rocksburg’s first black police officer, who Balzic met and formally recommended in Blood Mud.
By this time, Constantine’s fictional world dominated over any real world resemblances. These characters worked out their fates within it, with distinct elements of classical tragedy—tragic flaws and all. They are different from the Balzic books, yet just as compelling. (Balzic appears in the Rayford section, does him another favor and says that it will mean Rayford has to forever “listen to my stories,” a perfect distillation of both elder behavior and elder Balzic’s function in these last books.)
And the rest was silence, or so it seemed. The books stopped coming, and Carl Kozak finally revealed himself as the author, and signed a few books in 2013. But at that time, he complained that while he was still writing, he wasn’t getting published.
Yet he must have persisted because the manuscript for his final book emerged from the editing process, and was signed, sealed and delivered just days before he unexpectedly passed away in 2023.
Published earlier this spring (of 2024), Another Day’s Pain centered on Rugs Carlucci for the fourth time. Like the previous novel, Mario Balzic puts in some spectral appearances as a (maybe) slightly addled sage. By this time, Carlucci himself is on the brink of retirement, but apart from dealing with the petty violence and twisted personalities he must confront on the job, he is dealing with the fallout of tragic circumstances in the present and the past.
Psychological issues emerge in all of these novels, but mental health is never more central than in this, the last one. Over the course of the Carlucci novels, his increasingly violent mother goes from being a kind of deluded harpy in his home, torturing him with a past neither of them can fully deal with, to a very violent threat who inflicts serious injury, to a mental patient who enacts one last violent revenge.
If this was not enough to shatter Carlucci, he is hit with suddenly resurrected memories of abuse by a priest in his own youth, as well as the breakdown of the one person who gave his life hope, his girlfriend, the beautiful Franny Perfetti. The novel ends with both of them making slow progress towards normality, but far apart. There are words about how you don't have to be in a war to get PTSD that are similar to words in his wife's obituary. The story at times edges perilously towards the Gothic, but the writing is just as hypnotic, and the artistry is intact. In his late 80s, K.C. Constantine still had it.
What did he have? I can’t make comparisons with other police procedurals. Apart from Raymond Chandler, a dash of Hammett, most of Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s original detective, the only such series I’ve read are Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Nation Police novels and Donna Leon’s Commisario Brunetti in Venice. And it’s very obvious I can’t detach from the variations on Greensburg.
But I can say this much. In that afterword, Constantine wrote about the importance of getting the tone right. Call it tone, flow, music, voice—it keeps you reading with forward momentum, and it keeps you comfortable reading, even when the stark hardness of many of those lives and the people living them are hard to take. There is humor, though mostly black, and there are moments of warmth and hope. The protagonists—Mario Balzic, Rugs Carlucci—are flawed and conflicted but above all they are earnest—and so you root for them, even when what they are up against is themselves.
Greensburg also lost an actual police chief when he was arrested for dealing drugs. Another descendant of the real fire chief called Ed Sitko in the books is the new fire chief, at least the third generation, and the town experienced a murder more horrendous than any in Constantine’s books.
