Wed 28 Apr 2021
A 1001 Midnights Review: K. C. CONSTANTINE – The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[8] Comments
by John Lutz
K. C. CONSTANTINE – The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself. Mario Balzac #2. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1973. David R. Godine, paperback, 1987.
Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, police chief Mario Balzic, despite misgivings, is persuaded by the new commander of the state troopers, Lieutenant Minyon, to accompany Minyon on the first day of hunting season. Balzic isn’t crazy about Minyon, and hunting (animals, that is) isn’t Balzic’s favorite pastime.
Things go wrong. Minyon’s prize Weimaraner bites him in the hand while they are in the car on the way to the hunt. Then the dog causes even more problems for Balzic by rooting around in the woods and finding a human bone. Balzic is given the task of discovering who is missing, and finding the rest of the body.
The someone missing turns out to be Frank Gallic, the partner in a discount meat business with Balzic’s friend Micky Samrnara. Sammara and his sister Tina have been operating the business for almost a year while waiting for Gallic to return. Minyon decides that Mickey had something to do with Gallic’s disappearance and arrests him, prompting Balzic to hire feisty Mo Vukanas, a local lawyer with a burning dislike for state troopers, to defend Sammara.
This is offbeat crime fiction, written in a readable, literate style, tightly plotted and with believable, very human characters in familiar settings. Constantine knows how to maintain suspense. He lets it unfold to a logical and satisfying conclusion.
Equally offbeat and worth reading are the other Mario Balzic novels, which include The Rocksburg Railroad Murders (1972), A Fix Like This (1975), the acclaimed Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes (1982), Always a Body to Trade (1983), and Upon Some Midnight Clear (1985).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
UPDATE: There have now been 17 books in Constantine’s “Rockburg” series, through 2002. I do not believe that Mario Balzac has been in all of them, or if so, only tagentially. #12 in the series, Good Sons (1996) is described thusly: “Detective Rugs Carlucci is the likely successor to Police Chief Mario Balzic…,” but in #13, Family Values (1997), Balzic is called back into service.
April 28th, 2021 at 8:37 pm
John D. Lutz was a professor of mine in college. Wonder if.
April 28th, 2021 at 9:04 pm
I’d say probably not. It’s not a uncommon name. Just a spooky coincidence. The John Lutz who wrote this review was an extremely prolific mystery writer who died earlier this year. Covid-19 was a contributing cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lutz_(mystery_writer)
April 29th, 2021 at 6:27 am
Constantine is one of the most literate writers in the genre; few can craft a better sentence; fewer still can be so consistently readable. Early in his career there were many guesses as to who stood behind the pseudonym — everyone from Howard Fast to baseball player Phil Rizzuto. It turned lout the author was publicity-shy Carl Kosak, a one-time university creative writing and composition teacher who reportedly was fired because he refused to get his master’s degree. Little is known about the author. He’s now 87 and he published his last book in 2002. His works seem to have fallen into anonymity now, which is a shame.
April 29th, 2021 at 8:21 am
Rugs Carlucci worked for Balzic before succeeding him. I read all the early ones in the series but not the later ones. I should really go back and check which ones I missed.
April 29th, 2021 at 8:32 am
I wish it weren’t so, but I think, Jerry, you’re right in saying that Constantine is all but forgotten today. On the other hand, I don’t think he was really all that popular with mystery fans while he was still writing. I do remember a lot of speculation as to who he really was, but not that many reviews of his books themselves.
Nonetheless, a series of 17 books is a legacy that a lot of mystery writers can’t lay a claim to.
April 29th, 2021 at 8:06 pm
The Balzac books had greater critical reception than sales as I recall, but they were admired widely if not widely popular. I certainly read most of them, but finding them sometimes took a bit of work.
I always thought they would have been ideal for a television series. At the time Constantine was regularly compared in literary quality to Macdonald and Simenon.
April 29th, 2021 at 8:12 pm
It is too bad that the books were written before Netflix and Amazon Prime came along. A small niche viewing audience might have been all they needed. (Or if PBS cared at all for home-bred mystery series.)
April 29th, 2021 at 9:36 pm
Inspector Morse with John Thaw, shows just how ably a good mystery can be translated to the serial screen.