Bottom Liner Blues

Mario Balzic Detective Mystery #10

by K.C. Constantine

With its shut-down mines, with its scarred and restive blue-collar descendants of Eastern European and Italian immigrants, Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, is in the midst of tough times. And no one has it tougher than its own police chief, Mario Balzic. Working harder and longer hours than he ever did in his long-ago rookie days, Balzic again pilots a black-and-white through the town's brooding streets. The recent death of his mother, whose warm presence is especially missed by his wife Ruth, doesn't make it easier. Balzic answers a a strange woman, Valery, mother of a young daughter named Coo, warns that her violent husband may exact a brutal form of revenge on a truck-driver with a shady past. She wants Balzic to head off the attack, but supplies few details. Balzic senses worse trouble ahead than suggested by Valery - and events prove Balzic's instincts apocalyptically correct. Meanwhile, at the local tavern, Balzic encounters Myushkin, a wild, deceptively eccentric Russian-American writer, with nine novels to his credit, no visible means of support, and an alarming facility with a .22 revolver. It's Myushkin who becomes Balzic's spiritual guide through the case - and a peculiarly American, distinctly personal brand of hell.

Genres: Mystery

250 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Carl Constantine Kosak is an American mystery author known for his work as K.C. Constantine. Little is known about Kosak, as he prefers anonymity and has given only a few interviews. He was born in 1934 and served in the Marines in the early 1950s. He lives in Greensburg PA with wife Linda.



http://www.badattitudes.com/KCCintvw....

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the weaker entries in Constantine's fine "Mario Balzic" series. The "whodunit" is pushed back to the sidelines to make way for (to me) a pointless digression on intellectual property law for writers and the state of the US economy in the 1980s.

[Dan Downing · Rating 3 out of 5]

For sure there are people who would swoon reading this book. Not me. I have never liked slapstick and I have had enough impossible conversations in my life (conversations we won't dwell upon) that I do not enjoy reading them.
That said, Mr. Constantine does draw Pennsylvania small towns, particularly those in the Western parts of the State, with a deft hand. In this particular case, there is the beginning of a crime and a mystery in the first few pages. Next comes a lot of dreck followed, almost at the end, by as much of a resolution to the mystery as we will get. Lastly is a bit of fluff.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded down from 4.5 stars. Started out very strong but was spoiled — as many other reviewers have noted — by dozens of pages of ranting against libraries (with a little ranting against corporations and the first George Bush thrown in) by an extremely contrarian writer who has received much more acclaim than money. He's far too irritating to spend a lot of time with, and the whole episode is a very lengthy digression. There are a few other heavyhanded moments as well, which is not unusual in a Constantine novel. However, the characters feel very real, much more so than in many novels, especially in the mystery/police genre. And the portrayal of a Rust Belt suburb of Pittsburgh is compelling and authentic (judging by its similarity to neighbourhoods I knew in Hamilton, Ontario). This was the instalment of the Balzic series that saw Constantine veering toward social commentary. I first read it when it came out in 1993. This time I found the characters still very much alive and many of the observations still relevant. In its way, it's better than J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which covers some similar ground. True, it's almost all description and almost no mystery. The worst drawback: the anti-library rant by the Myushkin character sounded as if it might express vexations felt by Constantine himself. (The complaint about authors receiving only one small royalty from books that libraries can lend scores of times is offset, at least here in Canada now, by payments from the Public Lending Rights program.)

[Virginia Walter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Times are hard in Rocksburg. The mines that had supported its Italian and Eastern European immigrant workers have closed, and no industry has taken their place. In this dreary environment, Balzic gets a call from a young woman who is concerned that her ex-husband will do something violent to a truck driver. Until that tip results in two tragic deaths, the reader must suffer through too many pages of Myushkin ranting on to Balzic about the wretched state of the world.

[John Marr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easily the worst Mario Balzic I have read, which is to say it's not bad but most certainly not recommended as an entry point. While the portrayal of a depressed, decaying Western Penn post-industrial town reamains spot-on, the monologues, especially by a garrulous Russian writer, ramle on a little too long, displacing and overwhelming and already paper-thin plot.

[Katherine Spivey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unsatisfactory in the extreme. Worse part of having a ranter for a character ... you have to read the senseless rants. And no wrap-up.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one was far too heavy on dialogue and too little plot

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm rating this very high with caveats and warnings. It is a great addition to the series, but does not seem to be a welcoming stand-alone volume for new readers.

Warning:
1) If you want to read this book, stop and go back *at least* to the third book in the series and work your way forward. It's worth the journey even with the shocking reality of many bigoted characters in those early volumes.
2) There is a ton of juicy dialogue and character development in this book, but less direct plot to hold the episodes together. You need come to this volume with a love (or at least appreciation) of the characters to really appreciate the depth and subtleties.

Caveats:
1) I worked as an intern doing heritage preservation work in Pennsylvania, so I loved Mario's rant against heritage tourism:

In one of Balzic's blacker moods, he thought that the surest way you know something's dead was when somebody started talking about preserving its memory. There wasn't a coffin around that could match a museum for saying something was croaked. Coal-mining museums and steel-making museums to match Sea World or Disneyworld or a bunch of water slides? Given a choice on a hot day between being splashed by Shamu the killer whale or zipping down long wet slides into cold water, what family wouldn't positively choose to take their kids to look at a building full of miner's lamps and lunch buckets? Balzic had gotten roped into going to a railroad museum in Johnstown once. From his point of view, the pathology lab in Conemaugh General Hospital was cheerier. Wandering around in a dingy building in bad light, looking at rails and spikes and gandy dancers' hammers was about as much fun for him as looking at a corpse with no ID.

2) I am a frequent library-user and was blown away by the 50+ page rant against libraries. I'm a bit of a heel for borrowing this book from the library (along with the first 9 books in the series) which means that I have gotten a lot of pleasure from our fine author, Mr. K.C. Constantine, but have given him jack sh*t in return for all his hard work.
3) I loved getting some close-up time with Mario and Ruth, but their relationship and Ruth's existential troubles have been building over the series, so can only really be appreciated if you start at no earlier than book four in the series...and you'll still be missing a lot by skipping the first three.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

#10 in the Rocksburg, PA / Mario Balzic series.

#10 - Mario Balzic deals with the effects of the failing economy in Rocksburg. Myushkin, a penniless author, drivers the novel along with his encounters with Vinnie, the bartender, and Mario. Mario's wife has an emotional crisis after the death of Mario's mother and wants to be her own woman and change her relationship with Mario.

[Jeff Dickison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many supposedly witty words, not enough action.