History of My Reading: Phoenix in Flight/ Boston 1972

 

For young writers in the 1920s it was Paris.  In the 30s it was  the WPA Federal Writers Project and various literary and theatrical communities in New York. In the 40s it was radio and Hollywood.  In the 50s it was television. In the 60s, improbably, it was theatre—in London, New York and even Eastern Europe. (Unless you were at least equally a musician, and then it was rock music. For a few, there was also the Andy Warhol scene in New York.)

  In the 1970s it was the alternative press, including the new rock music publications, and the New Journalism of New York-based magazines. 

 These were the entry points, the new and exciting places hungry for talent and maybe even community. They were where it was happening, but also, crucially, they were the prime opportunities of their day. 

   This was the opportunity I stumbled into, when I began writing humble book reviews for the alternative weekly, Boston After Dark in 1971.  It was one of the new weeklies sometimes described as “sea-level,” because they were midway between the underground press and the established daily newspapers.  They were also called “countercultural,” and they certainly were aimed at a young readership, with emphasis on rock and other entertainment and arts, as well as more or less radical politics.  With all of its colleges and universities, the Boston area had a huge potential readership. 

I had a book review assignment for early November but I first delivered an unsolicited but timely piece on poet Pablo Neruda winning the Nobel Prize. That was the first to be published, followed a couple of weeks later by a review of Sylvia Plath’s now classic novel The Bell-Jar.  I’m not sure if this was assigned, but the book was newly published in America in 1971.  The first review that definitely was assigned was Paul Dixon’s Think Tanks, a nonfiction appraisal on those little known but influential institutions, published in early December.

 I delivered my pieces in person, sometimes hanging around for feedback from Jake Kugel, the literary editor, and hopefully to get another assignment and some more books. Once that December he told me that the staff Christmas party was taking place at a restaurant and bar nearby, and that I should go over. I did, but there was almost no one there yet.  I was sitting alone at a small table with my free drink when an amazingly beautiful young woman walked in, looked around and left.  She turned out to be Janet Maslin, one of the Arts Editors at Boston After Dark.  John Koch, the senior movie reviewer, and Ben Gerson, the music editor and chief writer, were the others.

 On another visit to Jake, he sent me back up the corridor to Ben Gerson’s office, who was pretty open to new writers for record reviews.  Ben pointed to a pile of records stacked against a wall, told me to pick out a couple, and write 150 words or so on them.  I’d earn $5 for each review published, plus I got to keep the record. 

By then I had already started writing for Creem magazine, which published my movie reviews and even a short piece of fiction, as well as record reviews (the first national review for Bonnie Raitt) and music features (my first was on James Taylor.) With a few pieces for Creem as well as B.A.D., Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs told me how to write to record companies and request to be put on their lists for new albums. They sent me a list of contacts. Some responded, some didn’t, but pretty soon I was getting free records through the mail.  Warners was particularly generous, I recall.  I also wrote reviews occasionally for other publications, such as Time Out. That’s how I got to be one of the first generation of rock critics, at a time that rock artists were big business.

 There were concerts and club dates galore as well as records, and I covered some, mostly in Boston but also on trips to New York City.  My first one-on-one interview was with Bill Withers in his trailer before a summer concert on Boston Common. He probably sensed I was nervous so we sat together on a step to the trailer and chatted.  I asked him about the theme running through his new album; he said he didn’t think anyone would notice that there was one.  

Harrison with Pete Ham of Badfinger

My first big concert assignment was Badfinger, and I dressed up in a three-piece corduroy suit.  Before the concert I got up from my seat and walked up the aisle to the outer area, and heard this titter in the crowd. I then realized that they might have thought for a second I was George Harrison, who’d produced Badfiner’s latest album.  I had the long hair and beard as well as the cord suit.

 The life of a rock critic also included attendance at various promotional events, which always featured free food and drink.  A few times a limo actually picked me up at the B.A.D. office.  My friend Mike Shain, writing for Broadcasting Magazine then, said there were freelancers in New York who pretty much lived on the food at these events.

 Rock music as a serious cultural force was so new that there were few books on it then.  Mostly we read magazines and music tabloids, especially Rolling Stone, but also others that have come and gone.  And of course we read each other.  The coverage in established newspapers and magazines was sparse and generally laughable.

 I reviewed albums by David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Harry Nilsson, the Bee Gees, Little Feat, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Ravi Shankar and the Incredible String Band as well as the now mostly forgotten (but remembered and revered by some) Jackie Lomax, Family, Kenny Rankin, the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and Jim Carroll, and the completely obscure Audience and Formerly Fat Harry. Some reviews are embarrassing now (I didn’t understand Steely Dan’s first album) but I was maybe ahead of my time on others (I was much in the minority in proclaiming John Cale’s “Paris 1919” a masterpiece, which it is now acknowledged to be.)  I was hardly a music scholar, even about the roots of rock music before the 1950s, but the power of that music in those years was emotional.

 Besides Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs in the Midwest, the titans of rock criticism were Robert Christgau at the Village Voice, and Jon Landau, the record review editor of Rolling Stone in San Francisco, who actually lived near Cambridge, and wrote for its weekly, the Phoenix.  I met Christgau a few times, through Mike Shain, and later was friends with his younger sister Georgia.  I knew Jon Landau a little better, especially after he and Janet Maslin became an item.

Boston After Dark had its offices then at 1108 Bolyston Street in what likely was an old industrial building, close to the Bolyston Street subway station. (It looks like the building is now part of the Berklee School of Music.)  The paper was composed on the first floor, and the editorial and business offices were up a long flight of stairs on the second floor.  The door opened onto to the central reception area. Back to the right was the entry to the advertising and business offices.  Ahead were the editorial offices.  There weren’t many of them.

 Walking down that corridor, past the room sometimes occupied by a staff photographer and/or cartoonist, the first office on the left was Ben Gerson’s.  John Koch and Janet Maslin were in the next office on the left, opposite Jake Kugel’s on the right.  These consisted of a desk or two surrounded by plasterboard walls and a door.

 At the end of the corridor was a room occupied by assistant editor Kate Herriges and her intern, Mike Baron.  But a sharp right immediately before this area led to a large room that was basically the office of the Editor (by early 1972, Teddy Gross) but was also the entire news department. True to its name, Boston After Dark had begun as an entertainment paper, with gradually expanding news. For awhile it especially was home to veteran journalists of “the movement,” such as Carl Ogelsby, Alexander Cockburn, Derek Shearer, Frank Browning and others.   

Soon I was also writing a few movie reviews but mainly I did books—all kinds of books: fiction (short story collections by John Updike and Doris Lessing, novels by Vonnegut, Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo, and posthumous novels by Hemingway and Camus), poetry (including Ann Sexton, James Wright, D.H. Lawrence, James Tate, Jonathan Williams) and poetry anthologies; literary criticism, psychology, anthropology (including Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman), linguistics, politics, education and memoir (Run-Through, John Houseman’s nearly 500 page evocation of working with Orson Welles in the 1930s Federal Theatre project and the Mercury Theatre, which I’ve recently re-read with great pleasure.) 

 A number of my reviews were of books of countercultural interest, like a novel by Raymond Mungo (author of the classic hippie memoirs Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm), Michael Weller’s play Moonchildren, and Digger guru Emmett Grogan’s bitter memoir, as well as the latest pop psychology, including astrology and the occult.  I was enchanted by the novel Hide Fox, And All After by 17 year old Rafael Yglesias, who went on to a writing career in books, movies and television.

 I also got (or created) some reviewing opportunities related to old enthusiasms.  I wrote about Richard Ellmann’s Ulysses On the Liffey, a fairly short book based on a series of lectures about the structure of Joyce’s novel.  In college and afterwards I idolized Joyce as well as Ellmann’s hefty biography.  I also contrived to review a couple of books by Thoreau, including one we’d used in Doug Wilson’s Emerson and Thoreau course at Knox College, along with a newer enthusiasm, Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life.

 In fact, to this day my shelves include books I reviewed or at least mentioned then, that I was unlikely to acquire otherwise: Penelope Gilliatt’s wonderful stories in Nobody’s Business, Lewis Mumford’s Interpretations and Forecasts, The Unknown Lewis Carroll, Evan S. Connell’s Points of a Compass Rose, Reynold Price’’s Things Themselves, Suzi Gablik’s Magritte (the first in depth treatment of that artist), poet Paul Eluard’s Capital of Pain and poet Michael Benedikt’s Mole Notes. Reviewing William Irwin Thompson’s first book (Imagination of an Insurrection) led to looking out for his subsequent books over ensuing decades.  The same was true for several other authors. 

One of the books I no longer have, however, is Dow Mossman’s novel Stones of Summer. A very long first novel that quickly disappeared, it has since become legendary, especially due to a documentary film made about it and its iconic status, as well as its reclusive author who never published again.  It turns out that my review was just about the only one it received, perhaps 250 mostly admiring words.  The documentary director heard of its existence after he’d made his movie, so although two people I know (and who do not know each other) are interviewed in his film, I am not.  Plus I had by then sold this apparently rare first edition along with others to a Pittsburgh bookstore in 1996, to lighten the load of the Ryder truck I drove here to California.  It’s worth a lot more now than I was paid for it. 

Joyce Carol Oates in 1972

Book reviews didn’t pay much—the book itself was the treasure. Still, you can’t eat them, so I aimed for some sort of weekly stipend.  I lobbied for a book review column, which would include a main review and short notices of other books received, to encourage publishers to send us more.  By spring of 1972 my “Book Report” column was appearing.  And we were getting loads of new books from presses large and small. I was getting letters from writers I reviewed or mentioned.  A note from Joyce Carol Oates, probably responding to my laudatory review of her nonfiction book on tragedy in fiction, resulted in a correspondence of a half-dozen or so letters.

 I also got letters from readers, some appreciative but others disputing or correcting me, and even a few threats. Other staff members and people I knew or just ran into often commented on my reviews and other pieces.  This helped make me conscious of reading eyes, so I was even more carefully about checking facts and spelling, and avoiding other mistakes.  If it wasn’t before, this instilled a consciousness and habits of care that has been part of my writing process the rest of my life. 

As for how I learned to write book reviews at all, the answer is simple: by reading book reviews. Those magazines I subscribed to in high school ostensibly for speech club all contained book reviews—from the newsweeklies to The New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and a magazine I recall reading the first year or so of college, the Saturday Review.  I also happened to begin reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review regularly just as its most glorious era began with the editorship of John Leonard, the best reviewer and editor I ever encountered as a reader, before or since.

 I absorbed the rules of the form (including the journalistic part of conveying information about the author and the book, etc.) and a sense of their style and their possibilities. And I learned from my peers. It was the same basic process by which I learned to write all other journalistic forms.

  Apart from the journalism basics I learned in high school social studies, I didn’t have a single journalism course.  I learned by reading and by writing.  My college education as a liberal arts English literature and composition major helped of course, in general and various specific ways.  But that education led up a path of graduate school (or a writers workshop) and the combination of college teaching and literary writing.  I had wandered off that path, never to return.  

 Eventually that year, when Jake Kugel left, I became responsible for managing this surfeit of incoming books as Books Editor (Celia Gilbert became the Literary Editor, responsible among other things for the poems the paper published.) In terms of sheer volume at least, I’d come a long way from borrowing two books for two weeks from the Greensburg Public Library. 

In late summer of 1972, we returned from a weekend to learn that our publisher, Steven Mindich, had bought out his Cambridge rival, the Phoenix. We were now the Boston Phoenix.  A few Cambridge Phoenix writers elected to come over, but most stayed and reconstituted themselves as a staff-owned weekly called The Real Paper.  There was a stir—one of the former Phoenix writers (Andrew Kopkind) referred to Mindich in our pages as a “hip capitalist.” Steve and I had our differences, but I admired the moment he came to an editorial meeting. “I am not a hip capitalist,” he announced.  “I am a capitalist.” Still, for most of us, nothing much changed, at least not immediately.

 Also that summer, while racial tensions over busing in Boston were erupting in sporadic riots, the Rolling Stones played the Boston Garden.  I was there with a half-dozen others from the Phoenix.  We were high up and far away from the stage as we watched a tiny Stevie Wonder perform, and when he ran out of tunes, we waited for the Stones to appear.  

An hour or so went by before Boston Mayor Kevin White appeared at the microphone instead of Mick Jagger.  He told us that Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested for an altercation with a photographer after getting off their plane in Rhode Island, but that he’d gotten them released and they were on their way. After the cheering stopped, his voice dropped dramatically. “Another part of my city is burning,” he said.  He was pulling police from the Garden area to help with the emergency. He asked the crowd to act responsibly.

 We had about another hour to wait, but the mood turned giddy, and frisbies and beachballs began to appear, being tossed from level to level, with notable catches roundly cheered.  Finally the Stones appeared, but I was too exhausted by then to appreciate much.  I don’t think there was much energy left in the rest of the crowd, either.  

 I probably reviewed more books than I remember, but as far as I know, no B.A.D./ Boston Phoenix archives exist anymore for 1971 and most of 1972--at least, not online.  My bookshelves remind me of some, but I have clips of most of those I mentioned.  As book review editor, cutting out clips of reviews was part of my job as I conceived it.  I kept some of my own but mostly I clipped everybody's, to send to publishers of the books reviewed. This was especially important if I'd written or called to request review copies. This gave us credibility as a publication that regularly wrote about books and authors.  If nothing else, it probably encouraged publishers to send us more books. But it got their attention in another way, as I was to discover.

 I described the basic physical layout of the B.A.D., now Boston Phoenix offices, with the business side separated from the editorial side by the reception area.  This was more than a physical separation.  There was (in those days) something called The Wall between business (specifically advertising) and editorial. It meant that editorial did not take advertisers into account when deciding what to cover or print.  This protected editorial integrity, while giving the ad reps cover when advertisers were unhappy about something that appeared.  

But this didn’t stop certain efforts at persuasion, gentle or otherwise, from Barry M., the head of advertising sales.  Barry came to me with various ideas for things I should write about, basically because they were good for advertising. (Or things he was afraid we were going to write about that might be bad for advertising.) I listened to him, and though I got angry a few times, he was a genial guy and I basically saw it as a game we played, because I never accepted a single idea he offered.

 In addition to the regular weekly paper, which by mid- 1972 sometimes came in two sections (news and arts), we published occasional supplements on particular subjects.  The largest as I recall was the Music Supplement.  I wrote several pieces for those, including the article I had the most fun researching, on the iconic countercultural comedy group, Firesign Theatre. Their hilarious recorded narratives were filled with puns and countercultural references and themes.  This was at a time that shaggy strangers who were lined up to get into rock concerts might while away the time by combining to reproduce a Firesign Theatre scene from memory. At one point I had all four of its members on the phone for an interview, which was as funny and surreal as their albums. 

 Then I proposed a Book Supplement, which was approved.  But not by Barry.  He came to moan to me about how he couldn’t see how to sell ads for it.  There were two major publishers in town: Little, Brown, and Houghton-Mifflin, and lots of bookstores.  But how was he going to fill all those pages?  I didn’t know, I said, and I didn’t care.

 I edited our first books supplement in fall 1972 (November 28 issue.) Unfortunately I haven't yet found a complete copy if I have one somewhere. I did locate a couple of pages from it, with my essay on Philip Roth, about his complaint that American reality was more bizarre than anything a fiction writer could imagine, along with a review of his latest novel, The Breast. The piece was headlined "The Gripes of Roth," suggesting I'd learned something from John Leonard's amazing headlines in the Times Sunday Book Review.  The pages also have the beginning of Victor Burg's piece on the latest works of several Southern writers, including Flannery O'Connor's collected stories, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and essays by Reynolds Price.  I met Victor at his day job of presiding over the Harvard Bookstore.  I believe there was another piece on Southern writers, by a  young woman who grew up in New Orleans and never written for publication before.

 A word about Walker Percy, who seems to be forgotten but was then a respected and in some ways seminal writer, and still deserves to be read.  Re-reading Love In the Ruins today, it first of all reminds me of two things: where I first heard of Early Times bourbon, and how apocalyptic those years were, the late 60s through the mid-70s, which he had projected into an alternative near future tale.  Walker portrays the extreme division in American life and  politics in terms that look very familiar today.  The breadth of those divisions was perhaps obscured by the most obvious cause: the still-ongoing war in southeast Asia. 

Speaking of which, this book supplement may also have been the occasion for a review of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which suggested that hubris in high places was a chief cause for getting into Vietnam and staying there. There may well have been an interview with the author included. 

In any case this did appear, even if not in the book supplement.  I was part of the Halberstam interview, held in his room in the Ritz hotel, where major New York publishers liked to house their top authors when they visited Boston.  Halberstam’s speaking voice, even in conversation, was at once authoritative and intimate, almost conspiratorial. He had an easy yet urgent way of describing his books as if he was letting listeners in on amazing things he’d just discovered. His interviews were tremendous assets, evident in this one, for his first of many books. Any criticism of the Vietnam war was still controversial, but this book was an immediate success. By early 1973 it was the #1 Best Seller on the New York Times list.

I was also part of an interview at the Ritz with Jerzy Kosinski, who published probably his best novel, Being There in 1971, and The Devil Tree in 1973.  I’m guessing it was the occasion of a paperback edition of Being There in 1972.  He turned out to be an dazzling raconteur who had us mesmerized with bizarre but convincing tales, mostly about his own life in Poland, Europe and America.  This is something else that might have appeared in the supplement.

Some surviving notes indicate I prepared a number of short reviews and lists: Fred Barron wrote short reviews of books on film, Mike Baron on books on Tarzan, Wayne Biddle on fiction, Adrienne Rich and Liz Fenton on books by and about women.  

 In any case, while I was getting the final editorial copy ready for this first book supplement, Barry bolted through the Wall from advertising, showed up at my desk very excited.  The ads for the supplement were rolling in, including the first national ads he’d ever sold for books.  He wanted to know when we could do another one.

As I recall we also got good response from readers, including a letter on McGovern for President stationery from a professor of English at Northeastern who took out a subscription, not because of our (mostly my) positive coverage of the McGovern campaign (read on), but because of the writing in our book supplement. 

 I wrote on other subjects as well in 1972.  I did music concert features on T-Rex and Neil Young, stories on music artists who appeared at the summer series on Boston Common (including Arlo Guthrie, the aforementioned Bill Withers and the last concert appearance anywhere by Smokey Robinson with the Miracles) as well as at least one news story on the music biz. 

 But I also did arts section cover stories, including one on Buckminster Fuller and another on Dick Cavett.  The week that latter story was in the current issue, I got a disorienting jolt one night. I was watching Cavett and about to turn it off, when I saw the next guest was comedian Mort Sahl.  He entered carrying a copy of my Cavett story (“Does the Emmy Spell Cancellation for Cavett?” Spoiler alert: it did.)  Sahl then read a few lines from the story, and the camera focused on the newspaper, with my byline. So my name appeared on Dick Cavett, though without my person. (It turned out Sahl had a week’s engagement at a club in western Massachusetts, where he saw the paper.)

 I ended the year with a series of stories that appeared in the front section of the Boston Phoenix, all concerning the 1972 election campaign between incumbent Richard Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern.  For reasons lost to history, I was assigned—or perhaps just permitted—to cover McGovern’s day-long, early October campaign stop in Boston. 

It was a bleak moment in a baffling campaign year. The country was riven by the Vietnam War, and McGovern had a clear plan to end it immediately. Never very popular, Nixon was embroiled in scandal, especially with the first reporting on what came to be called Watergate.  But there was still considerable hostility towards the anti-war movement, and my generation in particular.   The polls—just beginning to be a force in American politics—showed Nixon overwhelmingly ahead. Yet McGovern was getting increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds at his rallies, and after the contentious convention the Democratic party seemed to be uniting behind him.  So I focused my story on how the McGovern campaign and the press covering it evaluated the candidate’s chances.

  Before I started, I spoke with Tim Crouse, who lived in Cambridge and whose pieces on the media covering this campaign that eventually became his classic book, The Boys on the Bus, had begun appearing in Rolling Stone. He suggested people to talk to for my story.

 With my press credentials, I got to the noon rally early and stole a quick interview with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of the antiwar candidates in 1968.  I witnessed him meeting long-time Massachusett’s congressman and former Speaker of the House John McCormack.  I characterized this as the meeting of the Saint and the Pol.  “Should I genuflect?” I heard McCormack say, probably the best line in my story.  I talked with other campaign operatives, and eventually with campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz (an interview on the campaign bus to the airport) but I also spoke with various members of the press covering the campaign, in an enormous room full of tobacco smoke and typewriters at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel.

 At first I was just dazzled-- all these reporters from wire services and large newspapers across the country, pretty much all friendly and accessible.  When the most eminent of reporters entered—the New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston-- the waves parted before him.  He gave me a courtly nod, a kind of welcome to a newcomer, and maybe a blessing. 

As I reported in my piece, the traveling press saw a campaign that by traditional measures (crowd size and enthusiasm, party support and organization) looked like a winner.  I spoke with Connie Chung, then a young CBS News reporter attached to the campaign (smart, playful and more vibrantly beautiful than TV cameras ever captured), who also summed it up that way, and added: “Then I go back to Washington and they tell me he’s blowing it, look at the polls.” 

 I was also present when McGovern spoke to a small group of young people working for his campaign outside the hotel, and asked him a question or two as we shook hands there. 

My resulting piece was the front page lead.  When it was decided that it would be, I was summoned by editor Teddy Gross for a close edit session.  I learned more in that session than in years, before or after.  I had the same feeling a few other times over the decades, in particular with copy editors, but it was rare.  Reading now the five pieces I wrote over the next few weeks, this is clearly the best.

 It also happened to be published in Teddy Gross’ last issue as Editor.  Kerry Gruson, an associate editor for news, became the interim editor while a not very urgent search for a permanent replacement began.  Very early she said she would not take the job herself, a decision she came to regret.

 In the October 17 issue I had two pieces in the news section.  One was another piece on the McGovern campaign, when it came back to Boston for an evening fundraiser, a Gala which featured Hollywood stars (Tommy Smothers, Warren Beatty, Shirley McLaine) and political stars (Senator Ted Kennedy, the teenage Caroline Kennedy.)  Other politicians spoke as well-- they told jokes (as I noted in my piece) while the Hollywood stars made political speeches. 

Cassie Mackin

Again, I was an accepted citizen in the huge but this time mostly empty press room (where I ambushed Warren Beatty, evidently looking for NBC News reporter Cassie Mackin.  His answers to my questions were short, embarrassed and as useless as he meant them to be.) Later, during McGovern's speech, I stood in the press area near the front taking notes and looked over at the only other reporter who seemed to be doing the same--the aforementioned Cassie Mackin.  Tall, blond and outspoken, she was later targeted by the Nixon people and pretty much driven off the air.  She looked back at me and flashed a quick, incandescent smile. 

 Members of McGovern’s family were also at the gala, including his teenage daughter, Mary, who at some point ran past me in the company of a laughing Caroline Kennedy.  I ended my piece by re-stating the stakes of this election through these two teenage girls. Referring to McGovern’s dedication to transforming the political life of the country, I wrote: “One could not see Caroline Kennedy and not remember what that dedication means, and hope that the boy she was smiling at from the stage would at least be spared the killing and the dying, that Mary McGovern at least could be spared the further twisting of conscience, the frustration and the terrible absorption of energy that the war has brought to being young in America.”

 My second piece in that issue was a long exposition on the Nixon administration’s attempts to intimidate and control the press—efforts that would become even more obvious and effective in coming years.

 Along with the influence of polls, another new wrinkle in American politics was the role of television network projections of outcomes based on computer analyses. Computers had been used to predict vote totals as early as the 1952 presidential election, but even in 1960 they were treated as a novelty, a sideshow.  In 1972 they threatened to become a major factor. 

 I got a tip from someone—probably Mike Shain in New York, who couldn’t use the information himself—that NBC was planning for the possibility of announcing the presidential winner before the polls were closed in all the states. This had never happened. So I reported this in October 31 issue, along with reactions I solicited, from the ACLU for instance.  The response was divided.  Some saw it as a free speech issue, others as essentially disenfranchising western voters, and possibly affecting the election because the projections became self-fulfilling prophesy.

 This possibility was related to the overall danger that potential voters—especially potential McGovern voters-- would see all the coverage of the polls and then the projections, and become too discouraged to vote. They would simply give up hope.

 My pieces seemed to respond to the feeling I was picking up, even among the antiwar young, that either McGovern was insufficiently radical, or that no candidate who promised to immediately end the Vietnam war could win.  The McGovern campaign itself seemed to sense this, for in Boston and elsewhere they had the candidate stand under banners or behind a podium that said simply, “President McGovern.” Conceiving of the possibility seemed half the fight. (Erstwhile Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman co-authored a paperback titled Vote! in which they tried to persuade their readership that McGovern was one of them, sort of.)

 On the front page of our last issue before Election Day, we confronted the doubts about voting for McGovern with two stories.  A short book had been published outlining how McGovern could surprise everyone and win, mostly because of a huge youth vote. It was excerpted, under a picture of the famous photograph of Harry Truman in 1948 holding up a newspaper proclaiming his defeat, the morning after he’d won.

   Under that began my story about the many reasons to vote against Nixon, including the corruption that had already been at least partially exposed by Woodward and Bernstein in Washington.  (McGovern himself had proclaimed the Nixon administration “the most corrupt in American history,” but no one listened to that, either.) 

 I spent election night as a reporter at McGovern headquarters. It was filled with anxious but noisy supporters and campaign workers early in the evening, as a few young staffers stared at numbers coming into their computer terminals, eventually rendered speechless. Indeed at least one network did project McGovern’s defeat well before California polls closed, and the room emptied out as if by magic.  Local politicians in particular disappeared.  Someone eventually came down to the lonely podium to thank the few shell-shocked campaign workers who were still around.  But the silence in that room was like nothing I’d experienced, despite the fact that McGovern had won Massachusetts.  Unfortunately, it was the only state he did win. 

J. Anthony Lukas

Some weeks later, when New York Times reporter Anthony Lukas came to town to report on why Massachusetts was the exception, he had dinner with Kerry Gruson and she brought me along (he knew Kerry through her father Sydney Gruson, a Times executive.)  Kerry gallantly suggested one factor in the Massachusetts vote might be my series of stories in the Boston Phoenix.

(This was the winter that men were wearing fur hats, and Lukas was particularly proud of his, because he got it in Russia. )

 In months to come, as the war in southeast Asia got even worse, and the Watergate hearings and later the Impeachment hearings gripped the nation, I had a locally popular bumper stickers slapped on my guitar case, which I took on all my plane trips.  It said: “Don’t Blame Me/I’m From Massachusetts.”

 In 1972, the Boston Phoenix editorial staff was largely comprised of people in their twenties, most of them graduates of local colleges: principally Harvard (and Radcliffe), Brandeis and Boston University (BU). That was true of regular freelancers as well.  A slim majority were male, and I don’t recall a single person of color.

 I was friends with many of the people I worked with, including support staff.  We were part of each other’s social lives—we were swimming in the culture we were reporting, so I would often attend music events with Ben Gerson and others covering music, for example. We all went to movies together in various combinations.  Janet Maslin sometimes enlisted me to accompany her to movies she was reviewing, especially at theatres in a dodgy part of town. 

 I socialized most with those on the arts and entertainment side, but I did become friends with Kerry Gruson, before and after she became interim editor.  We had an odd moment that seemed significant when we both unexpectedly came back to the office after a weekend with dramatically shorter hair.    

 For reasons I don’t recall if I ever knew, Kerry invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at the house in Essex that she shared with her boyfriend at the time.  Her father was also coming, and in fact, they picked me up at my East Cambridge apartment for the hour or so drive to Essex.  They had a typical father-daughter moment on the way, when Sydney remarked on my Polish name and suggested his family might be Polish.  “We are not Polish,” Kerry said emphatically, in that “Oh, Dad” tone. 

 By the time we sat down to dinner at a long table, I was surprised to see that I was the only Phoenix staffer there.  As mentioned, Sydney Gruson was a New York Times executive.  He had been a reporter and distinguished foreign editor.  (His wife and Kerry’s mother, Florence Lewis, was also been a Times reporter in Europe.  What I don’t think I knew at the time was that 1972 was the year of their divorce.)  

Gloria Emerson

Because of Sydney’s presence, there were several Times reporters there, including Pulitzer Prize winners Gloria Emerson (who won hers for Vietnam reporting) and Anthony Lukas.  I mostly watched and listened. After dinner, I was packed into a car going back to Boston.  I was in the back seat, squeezed between Anthony Lukas and Gloria Emerson: the filling of a Pulitzer sandwich.  Lukas was so tight against me that when we turned to each other to converse, we were practically kissing.  On my other side Gloria soon fell asleep, with her head on my shoulder.

 But that somewhat out of body experience wasn’t the end of my day—I had another Thanksgiving dinner to attend that evening.  This one was hosted by Martha, the Phoenix receptionist.  She lived in my general neighborhood of East Cambridge with several housemates, and I’d been to their house several times.  I found myself again at a long table, this time with a few others from the Phoenix plus a number of others I knew and didn’t know.  This was a more relaxed and raucous group—at least I was more relaxed.  I found myself seated between two women I’d had at least flirtations with, and at one point was holding hands under the table with both at the same time.  A group of us ended up trooping off to a nearby blues club, after which I had just a short walk home.

My biggest problems with the Phoenix was in getting paid.  We had some real conflicts over both rates of payment and promptness.  But though I was the regular book columnist, and even filled in as music editor while Ben Gerson was away, I was essentially still a freelancers, and freelance writers were often treated poorly, and not just by this publication. 

 But then I got the chance for an actual weekly salary. I believe it was towards the end of the year that Steve Mindich offered me a job that had not previously existed.  The Phoenix was about to launch a redesign, and it would now regularly appear in two sections.  He offered me the new position of Managing Editor/Arts, with the Second Section as my responsibility.  The salary (which would cover my writing and continued tenure as Books Editor) was substantial: not only more than I had ever made (that would be easy) but more than my parents were making (though I didn't know it at the time.) 

 By the time I went back to Greensburg for a Christmas visit, I had accepted.  I would begin my new work in the new year—a year that turned out to hold more than one major change.

Reading Mason & Dixon

 I like reading long novels. Often they are among my favorites of  favorite authors, like Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City or Richard Powers' The Time Of Our Singing, Don DeLillo's Underworld (though my absolute favorite of his is the somewhat longish Ratner's Star) and Jim Harrison's The Road Home (nearly 500 pages on its own, it is also a kind of sequel to the shorter Dalva.) I've had stretches of taking on long classics all in a row: Moby Dick, War & Peace, Anna Karenina.  In the first few years of my retirement I read several long Dickens' novels, though I admit I haven't attempted the longest, Martin Chuzzlewit.  

I didn't come to this naturally (but that's a longer story) and I don't get through them all--I have yet to sustain interest in the world of Middlemarch, though I appreciate the skill of the writing.  I do need to be involved in the world of the novel, but what grabs me and holds me is the rhythm of the prose.  The pleasures of that are enough to keep me going, even when (as frequently happens) I'm not all that sure what's going on.  I've turned to plot guides, and in the case of Dickens, a good BBC/PBS film adaptation, to help me sort out the characters and events.

The writing, the mesmerizing rhythms of it have especially been the attractions of several of Thomas Pynchon's long novels.  I read V twice and had a pretty good idea of what was going on the second time.  I started Gravity's Rainbow several times, I loved the first section a lot (same with the first section of Ulysses) but couldn't get past it.  Then I read it through in the 1980s (when I noticed that the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai stole the name of Yoyodine Propulsions from this book.)  After my retirement in 2016 I read it again, this time with a guidebook or two.  That added to the pleasure.

Gravity's Rainbow is very likely Pynchon's masterpiece, but I have a special fondness for the 1085 pages of Against The Day.  If it has a plot I don't know what it is.  I experienced it as a compendium of early twentieth century genres, including the western and especially boy's adventures. The group of boys as a kind of Starfleet in dirigibles is just perfect.

The occasion for all of this is that I have finally finished another long Pynchon, Mason & Dixon.  I read its 773 pages over several years--so many I can't remember when I started it, but probably two or even three this time.  I've had a copy since it was published in 1997, but I was always stopped in my reading tracks by the strange 18th diction and spelling, and especially the rampant Capitalizations of nouns and their modifiers, and perhaps more. 

  This still slowed me down in this recent attempt, and this hefty volume would drift to the bottom of the pile next to me.  But I'd dip into it every once in awhile, if only for a shot of Pynchon energy in a dismal verbal world.  Then I would get rolling for awhile.  But since I seldom understood what was going on beyond the particulars of a scene, I couldn't sustain the momentum.  Until I did, and read the last two or three hundred pages in a long series of consecutive evenings.  

In general, the novel really is about Mason and Dixon--before, after and especially while they were embarked on the one job for which they are remembered, fixing the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland that by the 19th century became the border between North and South.  Other characters in the novel have historical counterparts as well (George Washington and Samuel Johnson have cameos, and Ben Franklin comes across as a wily crank who keeps getting people to electrocute themselves.)  I suppose I actually did learn things about the 18th century , but basically I was just along for the ride.

Besides--as Eileen Ecklund notes in a contemporary review I chanced upon after writing this piece, "...the most basic of my Pynchon reading lessons: you will not be tested on this later."

Instead of plot developments I noted little allusions, buried anachronisms and jokes.  Several titles of other Pynchon works appear in the prose, like "inherent vice" (p. 272) "against the day" (p.683), and a brief appearance of a family name (Bodine--p.566) that appears in other Pynchon novels, notably in V and Gravity's Rainbow.  There are allusions that perhaps only a Doctor Who fan would know (a Coach designed by the Jesuits--the scientist/magicians of the day--is "bigger on the inside" (p. 354) and a structure decaying in the woods also suspiciously akin to the TARDIS (412.)  And then there's the Kabbalistick sect that flashes a strange hand sign while uttering, "Live Long and Prosper." (485)  

The Reader's Fortitude is rewarded with Pynchon elegance and eloquence, such as on the subject of slavery.  Stories of new scientific technologies and of magic intermingle, especially on the Pennsylvania frontier (including country I know from my own boyhood)  and there is plenty of the Fantastic (a Robot Duck and a Talking Dog for starters.) The futility of the frontier mentality--in which perfection is finally just beyond the next ridge, until it always isn't--and the fluidity of actual and metaphorical border areas, all appear to be themes. But I mention all this less to explain the book, than to celebrate the fact that I read it.

I had just about finished reading it in fact when I learned of the imminent publication of the Mason & Dixon Companion, out last month, which presumably suggests more than I discerned about the plot, themes etc. as well as the many allusions I'm sure I missed.   But as much as I enjoyed this book, I'm not quite ready to start it all over again, Companion at my side.  But maybe someday.  For now, I am comforted by noting that it took 27 years for anyone to write a Companion to Mason & Dixon.

The Greatest Unknown American Writer: K.C. Constantine

 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.

 After nearly forty years publishing his Rocksburg series of police procedural novels under the pseudonym K.C. Constantine, and stubbornly protecting his real identity from just about everyone, Carl Kosak showed up for his first book signing in 2011, at the Festival of Mystery in Pittsburgh, an annual event that attracted mystery writers from around the country (Louise Penney attended as well that year.) But it’s only been after his death last year in 2023 that anything much has been known about his life, due principally to the efforts of his son Christopher.

 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. 

 He got in some unspecified trouble with police, and was given the choice of jail or enlisting in the military.  He joined the Marines.  I haven’t run across any further information on his military service, but if he graduated at 18 and played ball for even a couple of years, the Korean War would have been over when he enlisted. 

 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.    

   

Beginning with The Rocksburg Railroad Murders in 1972, the main character of Constantine’s first eleven novels was Mario Balzic.  In this book he’s in his mid-forties, and has already been on the Rocksburg police force for a quarter century, the last eleven years of which he’s been Chief of Police. Balzic would be the protagonist of 13 novels in the series total, and made at least an appearance in all 18.

 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 19^th 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.) 

With Bottom Liner Blues (1993) time is getting to be a theme.  Though cues of the year in which each novel takes place are scattered through previous books, they basically seem to be set in a timeless present, with Balzic a timeless presence—only vaguely described, with his age barely implied.  With this book, Balzic is thinking about his age—he admits he’s 64--and the year it takes place is stated: the brutally hot summer of 1990, the first record-breaker that became known for awhile as Greenhouse Summer.

  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.      

 

Meanwhile, in the real Greensburg, the Rialto bar --at least in the 70s and 80s-- was never quite as populated and lively as Muscottis, and didn’t look much like it, except for the ancient restrooms in the basement, which might have been built by the Romans if their empire had extended that far.  The last time I was there was on a 2019 visit with family and friends, when I had a plate of overcooked spaghetti in the restaurant half, learned that there was different management, and that the new bartender didn’t know that the famous bartender of Dom's day (named Vinnie in the novels) was called Baldy, now the name on the pizza shop next door.  Since then, the place fell on darker days, with a shooting and then a stabbing.  The state closed it, though new owners plan to reconstitute it as something called a gastropub.

 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. 

Seton Hill is now a university and has spread itself through downtown, which is looking less bedraggled, if not more lively.  There still seems to be no recognition of these novels, and the Kosak home was put up for sale.