Blue City

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. 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. Later versions appeared in Italian (1975), Greek (1995), and Portuguese (2000). In 1986, after Macdonald's death, the novel was "very freely" adapted to the disastrous film named after it. Background 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. 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". Others have commented on the likeness between Macdonald's 'Blue City' and the 'Poisonville' of Hammett's Red Harvest. 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. 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. 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. 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."