Blue City (novel)
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 Front cover first edition | |
| Author | Ross Macdonald |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 1947 |
| Publication place | United States |
Blue City is a thriller written in 1947 by Ross Macdonald. The novel was originally released under his real name, Kenneth Millar, by Alfred A. Knopf, while a condensed version was serialized in the August and September 1950 issues of Esquire.[1]
One of the novel's earliest translations was into Russian as a 1972 serialization in the literary review Znamaya, where what was perceived to be its exposure of the common cause between capitalism and the gangster ethic was greatly appreciated.[2] Later versions appeared in Italian (1975),[3] Greek (1995),[4] and Portuguese (2000).[5] In 1986, after Macdonald's death, the novel was "very freely" adapted to the disastrous film named after it.[6]
Publicity for Macdonald's hardboiled third novel, Blue City, linked the author's name with James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, a comparison deprecated in the mixed reviews that the book received at the time, although The Chicago Sun noted that at least it was in a completely different league from Mickey Spillane.[7] Macdonald himself later affirmed in an interview that Hammett had been a particularly strong influence on him: "I imagine I might never have written hard-boiled detective stories at all if it hadn't been for Hammett".[8] Others have commented on the likeness between Macdonald's 'Blue City' and the 'Poisonville' of Hammett's Red Harvest.[9]
The portrayal of the novel's unnamed Mid-Western small town, lying in the shadow of Chicago, is centered mostly on the disadvantaged who live in it and differs from the up-market California scenarios of Macdonald's later Lew Archer novels.[10] In a 1952 letter to his publisher, he explained that he had in mind "a town where I had suffered, and several of the characters were based on people I hated." It is from this that the book's anger and political stance derive.[11] The protagonist is narrator throughout, but will occasionally diverge from talking tough into what Macdonald's biographer describes as "civics lectures" or he overdoes literary reference.[12] The particular target of his anger is small-town pettifoggery. The self-congratulatory tabloid editorial justifying anti-union violence or the list of books suppressed in the library from which "it was somehow comforting to know that the good people of the town … were protected against the lubricity of Rabelais, the immorality of Flaubert, the viciousness of Hemingway, and the degradation of Faulkner."
Reviewing the book, Nelson Algren praised the over-all clipped descriptive style: "Kenneth Millar never uses two words when one will do; and when he wants you to see a thing, you see it." A later commentator looked beyond thriller conventions and discovered that "Millar wanted to do in prose what jazzmen did in music".[13] Here he was only following Macdonald himself, who had said in an earlier interview that "the imagery and rhythm and movements of jazz had a lot to do with forming my style in my early books. It's quite obvious in a book like Blue City." He also noted then that Jack Kerouac's "jazz-prose" was written later and more diffusely. There was no direct influence.[14]
