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' Goldbug Variations and 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 next 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.

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.    

N. Scott Momaday 1934-2024

 N. Scott Momaday, poet, novelist, playwright, artist, essayist, scholar and teacher, died in January.  He is best known for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  His father was Kiowa, as a child he was given a Kiowa name and identified as Kiowa, although he lived among and studied other American Indian peoples.

House Made of Dawn concerns a mixed blood Indian returning from the multiple traumas of World War II to the pueblo, trying to find his place in the modern and traditional worlds.  In telling this journey, Momaday uses both his knowledge of the written literary tradition and the traditional ways and stories of an oral culture. 

With this novel, Momaday revealed and defined a central dilemma of contemporary Native people: how to make a life in the often contradictory "two worlds" of modernity and their traditions.  This would become the model and inspiration for a slightly younger generation of Native writers who burst on the scene in the late 1970s through the early 1990s.  Each in their own way would also employ this dynamic of modern literary approaches and traditional storytelling and beliefs, in part to explore and honor traditional Native cultures and its point of view, particularly towards the natural world. 

  Leslie Marmon Silko is the most obvious heir: her debut novel Ceremony also follows an Indian soldier, this time a Vietnam vet, coping with the difficulties of returning home and finding himself. Others were direct and indirect beneficiaries of Momaday's example and success, including novelists Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, James Welch and Michael Dorris, as well as poets and storytellers Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, and many others.

These explorations are multiple: using literary form and traditional content, expanding literary forms to include traditional forms--all sorts of combinations beyond categories to create new stories that honor and expand the old.  The past is never left out, it is (as Faulkner articulated) always present.  The Native tradition is particularly important for its living attitudes towards the natural world and its relationships to human beings and culture.  Those attitudes and beliefs can be adapted and absorbed in our contemporary world--in fact, they must be, if the past and the present and the eternal itself are to have a future.

Momaday was a champion of the Native oral tradition, and he taught the subject for many years at various universities.  But he was also steeped in written literature, particularly American fiction and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries.  His detailed descriptions of the landscape use literature (including modern) in expressing and interpreting what the indigenous senses observe.   

Momaday believed in the spoken word today as well, and he read several times at the Humboldt State University near me.  I've seen the tape of one such reading and attended another one.  He had a bearing of great dignity, a precise pronunciation and an uninflected voice of great depth and power.

  The reading I attended was in one of the larger venues on campus, with Momaday at a lectern on a stage. He had hardly begun when the power suddenly went out.  He paused, calmed the crowd and continued anyway, so that deep, deliberate voice came out of the semi-darkness with no need for amplification, and with dramatic effect.  

Afterwards he signed my copies of The Names, (A Memoir) and The Man Made of Words, a collection of essays, stories and poems.  The essays touched upon the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Emily Dickinson (he studied her poems for a year, in manuscript), Teilhard de Chardin and Lewis Thomas, Georgia O'Keefe and Jay Silverheels, as well as his grandmother's stories.  He included observations from his travels in Russia and Germany as well as the American West.  

I think my favorite of his books that I've read is his second novel, The Ancient Child.  It uses his lifelong fascination with the legends of Billy the Kid to explore planes of myth of the past and the contemporary world.  It is at once a traditional novel with contemporary and semi-historical characters, a kind of personal anthology and an exploration of storytelling itself.  It has humor, too.  Momaday identified with the bear, saying he had bear power and occasionally turned into a bear.  But there was some Coyote in him, too.

Return of the Hardy Boys

 

Since I first wrote about the original Hardy Boys mysteries six years ago (in the History of My Reading series), there’s been some news.  

The Hardy Boys books began in 1927 with three titles, then three more in 1928 before the series settled down to issuing one title a year.  Last year (2023) the copyrights on these original versions of the first three novels expired.  That means they are in the public domain, and anyone can publish them, no permissions (or author payments) required.  It also means that anyone can alter them or just publish them badly, with mistakes, changes and eliminations.  But they are well published online at Project Gutenberg. They are: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill.

 The three titles published the next year, in 1928, presumably entered or will enter the public domain some time in 2024. They are: The Missing Chums, Hunting for Hidden Gold and The Shore Road Mystery. They are likely to appear online at some point this year. [UPDATE 3/35: These three are also posted now at Project Gutenberg.]  [FURTHER UPDATE 2025: these and two more public domain titles are also available in paperback from Dover Publications.]

 These are the original Hardy Boys novels, as written by Leslie McFarlane and edited by Edward Stratemeyer. McFarlane wrote 1 through 16, and 22 through 24, while other authors wrote the rest of the original 58, all under the name of Franklin W. Dixon. 

the revisions series

To further complicate matters, these originals were revised and rewritten by other authors in the late 1950s through the 1970s, supposedly to take out offensive stereotypes and update references and language, but often the stories were changed, as well as the writing style.  Many were shortened.  Then the series continued with new stories, in various formats, right up to today.

 Unfortunately the distinction between the originals and revisions is seldom made. For example, the online site The Creative Archive purports to publish the first 58 Hardy Boys novels online, but these are the 1950s-60s revisions, not the originals. 

At the end of this post, I make some comparisons of the originals with the more widely available revisions. Four of these appeared in my post six years ago (in slightly different form), but I’ve added comparisons of two more: #3 The Secret of the Old Mill and #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island, which the unofficial Hardy Boys page calls “probably the most popular story among fans.” 

 On balance, I continue to greatly prefer the McFarlane originals.  I recently chanced upon an article written by Gene Weingarten in 1998 entitled “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys” (included in his collection, The Fiddler in the Subway) that helped clarify my thinking.

 Weingarten, a magazine feature writer and purported humorist, trashes McFarlane’s writing in these books before praising him as a literary artist trapped by financial circumstances into painfully turning out trash, namely the Hardy Boys books. (McFarlane seems to base his quality of writing judgments on the first book he picks up--The Missing Chums, which unfortunately isn't one of the better written.)  This has become a familiar point of view on McFarlane, perhaps the prevalent one. I think it’s at best overly simplistic and on balance, deceptive and wrong.

 

a young McFarlane

It is true that McFarlane (just 25 when his first Hardy Boys books were published) was paid scandalously little to quickly write these novels, based on detailed outlines by Edward Stratemeyer, who invented the Hardy Boys, as well as Nancy Drew and Tom Swift. The author named on the cover, Franklin W. Dixon, did not exist.  There would be many authors as the series went on.  

But are the resulting novels possibly “the worst books ever written,” as Weingarten insists?  Not hardly.  For one thing, Weingarten hadn’t read the later revisions, which are arguably worse.  But even in themselves, the McFarlane versions do not fully merit his critique, especially in style. He says it is “overwrought.”  Apart from questions of taste (and Weingarten is very certain his taste is correct), there is the fact that these books were written for young readers, roughly ages 9 (the age when I started reading them) to 12.  Weingarten provides an example of this overwrought writing: “Frank was electrified with astonishment.”  It’s not a phrase appropriate for adult literary fiction perhaps, but it’s vivid language for young readers—many of whom are quite capable of becoming electrified with astonishment.

 (It’s certainly more creative language that Weingarten uses to introduce this article: “I started working on it with a chip on my shoulder.  I ended it with a lump in my throat.”  Now that’s bad writing--"overwrought" doesn't cover it.)

 Weingarten mocks the conversations conducted while the boys are riding their motorcycles, as if anyone could converse over that noise.  While stretching credulity a bit, these are 1920s motorcycles ridden by teenage boys after all, and not the behemoths of today.  In The Tower Treasure, a specific contrast is drawn between the “putt-putt” of their motorcycles, and the roar of an automobile.  Certainly there is awkwardness and repetition in the writing, but that more or less goes with the genre, and can be part of its charm.

 The elaborate language, not uncommon when these books were written, has a painless educational value for young readers in expanding their vocabularies.  As for the overuse of adverbs, it’s worth noting that  Stratemeyer had the final edit, and at least one of his other book series is well known for characteristic proliferation of adverbs—so much so that they inspired a specific type of joke: the “Tom Swifties.”  He may well have inserted some adverbs into the Hardy Boys books himself. 

Even so, the book are decently written, ascending to some fine writing.  At the beginning of The House on the Cliff, set in summer, McFarlane refers to the “torrid warmth” of the city.  The cliché is “torrid heat,” but his choice is more poetic, the double-r sound in “torrid” matching the “rmth” sound in “warmth.”

 The Mystery of Cabin Island opens with a page describing the winter landscape in clear physical language and measured sentences that remind me of Hemingway.  Nor was I surprised by Weingarten’s revelation that McFarlane was a devotee of Dickens—I got that from his books—especially the characters and set pieces that tended to be edited out of the revisions.

 It is this language, as well as the period details, that charm many readers today.  Although Weingarten quotes McFarlane’s granddaughter saying he hated these books (and his children are quoted elsewhere saying similar things), McFarlane is also directly quoted referring to his Hardys with some pride, saying that instead of the slapdash style of other boys books, “I opted for quality.”

  By and large, the revisions I've read did not.  In addition to changing plots and characters, with some bewildering story choices and careless writing, there were changes particular to reflect the J. Edgar Hoover 1950s obsessions with subversion, expressed in altered plots and an end to the skepticism of authority figures in the originals, especially local police.   Says the Hardy BoysUnofficial Homepage: “The quality of the revised stories is generally so far below that of the originals that it can only be considered an act of literary vandalism.”

There's no question that some of the writing and vocabulary as well as the action in the originals reflect an earlier time.  But that was true when I first read them as a boy in the mid-1950s, and I was charmed anyway.  The fact that there weren't roadsters and touring cars anymore, or chums, even added to the appeal: the charm of the exotic.  Reading them as an adult, I see them not as exotic but true to their time, in the modesty of the stories, their pace and organic quality, as well as evidences of a bygone era.  And so I remain charmed. 

Here are my comparisons:

 The Tower Treasure (#1)

The original version of this first novel in the series begins with exposition, while the revised starts with an action scene. This appears to be one item of the brief for the revisions--hook the reader with action. This time it works; in others I read the action is absurd by the standards set in the original series--of realism, especially of the Hardy Boys as normal or at least believable boys.

 Another item in the brief was to shorten the books to the same length of 180 pages. So what took two chapters and 17 pages in the original is reduced to one chapter and 8 pages in the revised.

 Some arcane language in the original is a bit disruptive, though funny, cf. "I'm going to ask these chaps if they saw him pass." But the revision goes further than updating words and eliding the story--it unaccountably adds incidents and characters, to no better effect than the originals. Plus it doesn't actually eliminate all ethnic stereotypes--just the ones people were more sensitive to in 1959.

 It isn't long before the losses become obvious. The original has a comic set piece involving a group of farmers; the human comedy is entirely lost in the revision, as is the pretty realistic dialogue in the scene. Similarly a scene involving the small town police chief and his detective is derisively funny. That such scenes reminded me of Dickens is reinforced a few pages later by a reference to a character habitually carrying Dickens' novels (naming three.) The original also throws in a sly Shakespeare reference, a phrase from Hamlet.

 But the loss of a certain literary quality is more telling in a line Fenton Hardy says to his sons on page 76 of the original, when he tells them they can help "by keeping your eyes and ears open, and by using your wits. That's all there is to detective work."

Later when the boys solve the mystery that has puzzled everyone (including their father), they conclude that "The main thing is that we've proved to dad that we know how to keep our eyes and ears open." (209)  The symmetry of these lines more than anything else starts off this series of books. They are entirely absent from the revision.

The revision has the good sense to keep the subplot of the father of one of the Hardy Boys' school friends who is unjustly accused of a crime (a similar situation will be repeated in a subsequent book), even keeping most of the dialogue. But for every arcane line the revision eliminates ("Brace up, old chap") it seems to lose one of delicate feeling or meaning: "Frank and Joe, their hearts too full for utterance, withdrew softly from the room." (68)

 This being the first novel, it has the first instances of official police incompetence, and Fenton Hardy's disdain for the local police. In the revision this is gone, though the comic futility of the chief and his detective Snuff is replaced by a comic and less convincing Snuff, now an aspiring private detective lost in self-importance, ambition and incompetence.

 The climactic scene in the revision suddenly adds a character to increase threat and action (the 1950s Disney teleplay has its own version of this character though he appears early, and interestingly represents a seemingly friendly but ultimately untrustworthy and violent adult) but it adds little to the scene. The ending of the original is longer and more satisfying.

  #2 The House on the Cliff 

The original story begins with the Hardy Boys and their pals (or "chums") escaping summer heat with a motorcycle ride,which leads them to a remote abandoned house, reputed to be haunted.  They do hear eerie sounds inside (which later turn out to have been staged to scare them away.) As they are leaving, Frank and Joe Hardy discover tools were stolen from their motorcycles. They later witness an attempted murder on a boat and rescue the victim, but he soon disappears.  This begins another strand of the mystery.

 The revised version begins with Fenton Hardy letting the boys in on a case in progress. This is another odd trend in the revisions: the boys are less independent.

The original story involves Fenton Hardy kidnapped by drug smugglers, with the boys putting together the pieces of the puzzle involving the "haunted" house on the cliff and hidden tunnels. They rescue their father, though they are almost immediately captured. There's a lot of action, including fist fights but they are believable. Some believe this is the best written novel in the series. The revision has some sloppy writing and makes inexplicable changes in scenes but basically follows the same story.

#3 The Secret of the Old Mill

This is one of the three originals that entered the public domain in 2023.  I read it online at Project Gutenberg.  It begins quickly with an incident that defines the mystery: while waiting at the train station for their father to arrive, the Hardy Boys are approached by an affable stranger with a convincing story why he needs to quickly change his five dollar bill, which they do, only to find that it's counterfeit.  When their father, detective Fenton Hardy arrives it turns out he is working on a counterfeit case.  The boys are embarrassed by being "stung," but eager to help solve the mystery,.

   A gently comic piece follows in which the boys are kidded by their high school friends for falling for the swindle--these glimpses of their regular lives are something the originals do well.  The Hardys are grounded in family, community and school-- though today's students might be surprised that their studies include Latin grammar and reading Virgil in the original.   Still, the emphasis of the story is on action and solving the mystery.

 After the Hardy's learn of another victim, there is another set piece of a high-spirited outing where the Hardys and their friends learned that an old mill has been revived by new tenants, though they aren't taking grain from local farms to grind.  Instead they've kept people away because they say they are working on a new breakfast cereal formula they must keep secret.  While there, the Hardys also rescue a boy from drowning, and he becomes important later in the story.  In due course they discover that the old mill is the center of the counterfeit operation that covers several states, and where the phony bills are made.  There's also action on the water, as the Hardy Boys get their new speedboat, the Sleuth.

In the revised version, it is their high school friend Chet who is victimized with a counterfeit $20 bill, discarding the opportunity to show the boys' generosity as well as their youthful naivete, as well as losing their personal motive to crack the mystery.  The revised version turns the old mill into the site of an electronics firm, doing something undefined that has to do with guided missiles.  Eventually Fenton Hardy is investigating sabotage at the electronics firm, where the counterfeit ring is a sideline by some of the employees who use the old mill itself as an entrance to a secret room where they print the fake money.  It's needlessly complicated and less credible, but it's also typical of the revisions in that it tries to make the stakes more dramatic and important, using a Cold War theme.  Small town life and small time crimes aren't good enough anymore, though it does reflect that, for example, there are probably fewer farmers around mid-20th century Bayport.

The revision includes some scenes from the original, though in different places in the story, often where they seem less organic.  The scene when the boys first see their boat is so much better in the original.  The new themes in the story and the shuffled and missing scenes suggest why the Unofficial Hardy Boys site calls this version "Drastically Altered" from the original.  Yet it isn't the worst of the revisions I've read.  At least it is carefully plotted (with the bad guys helpfully explaining everything just before they are caught.)    

#6    The Shore Road Mystery

The HBUHP calls the revision "completely different" but it basically reassembles elements of the original plot in a less coherent way.

 The original is more vivid in its scene-setting, and is pretty good at the effect on the town as a series of car thefts continue without a clue. There a nice school scene that's a kind of interlude. Scenes of the Boys in the caves where the thieves have hidden the cars are exciting, even if their handling of "revolvers" comes out of nowhere. The revision again starts with a big action scene--the Hardys have more technology now, like police radios on their motorcycles--but the plot seems more contrived.

In both stories, it's a school friend who is unjustly arrested for the thefts, but the revision adds a buried treasure mystery for some reason. Also the thieves aren't just stealing cars but smuggling in "foreign" arms for "subversives" in the US. Hello, 1950s!

 In the original, the Hardy Boys solve the mystery, and catch the bad guys in the act. But in the revision, they gets their butts saved by Dad, who incidentally has "an iron fist." What's up with that? as the Hardys wouldn't say. Also the revision suggests that the Boys' hometown of Bayport is in New England, which is contradicted by several of the originals.  They imply and finally say that Bayport is south of New York City.

 #8 The Mystery of Cabin Island

In summer (as we’ve seen in previous stories) the Hardy Boys and their chums run motorboats in Barmet Bay as well as ride motorcycles, go on picnics and engage in other warm weather activities.  What do they do in the winter?  In this original the answer is: ice-boats. 

Ice boats in this case are homemade skiffs on skis propelled by wind in sails to skate across the frozen area of the bay.  They can go very fast (the record for contemporary professional ice boats is well over 100 mph.) These craft were in fact becoming popular in North America in the 1920s.  A Saturday Evening Post Americana cover in early 1928 shows boys in their homemade ice boat, which may well have inspired this aspect of this 1929 story.  (Most ice boats ran on lakes and rivers, so an ocean bay south of New York might be a stretch.)

 Introduced by some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read in the series so far, the Hardys and friends take their ice boat to search for a place to go winter camping, and so they explore the small and solitary Cabin Island, but a strange man angrily orders them away.  They know the island and its cabin are owned by wealthy Mr. Jefferson, and so are surprised to find a note from him upon their return home, asking them to visit.  When they do they see the angry man leaving.  From Mr. Jefferson they learn the angry man is named Hanleigh, and is badgering him to sell him the island, but he won’t. The elderly Mr. Jefferson is all smiles—he thanks them for finding his stolen car (in #6 The Shore Road Mystery), rewards them, and agrees to allow them the use of his cabin on the island for their winter outing. 

The trip is to begin before Christmas so there is a lovely family scene in which the Hardys celebrate the holiday early so the boys will have both the traditional feast and presents, and their outing.  Back on the island they watch Hanleigh in the cabin, measuring the fireplace.  He threatens them again but they have the key and he is the trespasser, so he leaves. But they have the start of their mystery: why was he measuring the fireplace?  Why is his so fierce about the island?

 Eventually the boys learn of Mr. Jefferson’s missing collection of priceless stamps, and find a notebook kept by the man suspected of stealing the stamps (it’s the only instance I’ve run across of an actual date: 1917, which the Boys observe was 11 years before.) The notebook contains a coded message, and the mystery goes on from there, with a dramatic climax.

 In the revision, Mr. Jefferson’s reward (communicated to them offstage) is permission to camp on Cabin Island, and the promise of a new mystery.  When they meet him at his house he asks them to search for his missing grandson, who disappeared around the time that his collection of commemorative medals was stolen. (Why the switch from stamps remains a mystery.)  As usual, the incidents crowd together while scenes of ordinary life are dropped or shortened, like the Christmas scene.  

Adults (Fenton Hardy and Mr. Jefferson) are also present in the action more often. Both versions involve two minor villains—in the original they are young men, but in the revision they are high school dropouts who hang around the school and make trouble.  “Juvenile delinquency” was a catchword of the 1950s.  The Hardy Boys page classifies the revision as "Altered."

A side note: my copy of the original and of the revision both have the same cover image, and both have a "picture cover," rather than a jacket. My original is evidently part of the reprint series issued in 1962 (and my book apparently was a Christmas gift in 1963, though not to me) and it appears to be the same typeface as the original editions. It also has the same brown flyleaf illustrations as the original brown hardbacks that I remember so well from the public library.  

#10 What Happened At Midnight 

This is my favorite of the originals I've read as an adult, but I don't think that's entirely why I'm contemptuous of the revision, which HBUHP calls "drastically altered."

 The original is well-paced and balanced, as each increment of the mystery is pursued with activity, such as the Boys trip to New York City. But most of all, it has a real sense of high school boys doing the investigating, their normal life integrated with the mystery.

 It's also a great 1930s story, starting with the opening scene at Bayport's newest innovation, the Automat. Joe is kidnapped, Frank and his chums find him, but that's just the beginning. The brothers impulsively follow a suspect on the train to New York, lose their money to a pickpocket, sleep on park benches safely, prepare to hitchhike back to Bayport and earn a meal by washing dishes at a diner. (The diner owner is right out of a movie by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges.) They get a key clue overhearing a hotel switchboard operator, and learn of the existence of the collect call!

 As obsolete and therefore nostalgic as all this seems now, none of it was so arcane in the 1950s when I might have first read this book. The telephone system was basically the same, and I remember going to an automat restaurant in Manhattan in the 1960s.

 But the revision dumps pretty much all of it anyway. (Though I thought for sure the revision would drop a key scene of the boys in a biplane that loses power- they have parachutes and go out on a wing to bail out. But the revision makes the plane an antique reconstruction, and the scene happens in a different part of the story.) 

Bayport, by the way, in this novel is explicitly said to be located about 200 miles south of New York City, which suggests New Jersey.

 The mystery is solved through a combination of legwork, deduction, serendipity and coincidence. (Which fulfills Fenton Hardy's definition of a detective as someone who basically pays attention.) Some may object to the coincidences, such as the clues supplied by the clueless Aunt Gertrude. But it sure makes for a good story that keeps moving forward.

A coincidence puts the Boys in touch with a couple of FBI agents, and so the big finish is more believable with the adult agents doing the shooting and fighting during the capture, though Frank manages to chase and wrestle down the ringleader of the diamond thieves gang. (The Boys relationship with the local police is also better than in previous originals.)

 Other elements of the story are kept, but there are inexplicable changes. This time the gang is stealing diamonds and "electronics." (What kind of electronics? Why are they valuable? It doesn't say.) Again another needless and basically useless if not confusing plot element is added, a secret invention.

 The revision begins with a completely outlandish fight between the brothers and adult thieves. In general, the revision is haphazard and careless--literally in the sense that it seems to be written by someone who doesn't care. For dialogue that sounds somewhat formal, it substitutes dialogue that sounds entirely wooden. As for updating arcane expressions etc., the revision actually has one of the boys say "Gadzooks!"--a word from the 17th century that barely made it into the 19th.

 Finally, let me point out something else that's apparently obsolete. Especially in the originals, I did not find a typo or a grammatical error. These boys books, written quickly and expected to be read by teenagers or younger, and then to disappear, are immaculately edited, copyedited and proofread. So 20th century, right?