Bright Lights, Blue City

by

Paul Clark

 

When Kenneth Millar’s Blue City was published in 1947, the reigning kings of American hard-boiled fiction were Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Although no one knew it at the time, Hammett would never write another book and Cain’s best books were behind him. While Chandler’s best (arguably) novel The Long Goodbye wouldn’t be published until 1954, the gap between his novels was growing. In the post World War II era, the audience for hard-boiled fiction was as big as ever, but the top writers in the genre couldn’t write enough books to satisfy the market.

In 1946, Kenneth Millar was in his early 30s and had just finished a two-year stint in the Navy, working as a communications officer on a ship shuttling troops back from the Pacific theater to San Francisco. His wife, Margaret Millar, was an accomplished mystery writer, and was working in Hollywood on screen adaptations of her novels.

Before the war, Kenneth Millar had taught high school and college and was working toward his PhD. During the war he had written two mysteries that had achieved modest sales. Challenged by the success of his wife but wanting to write serious literary novels, he gave himself a year to make a living at writing—any kind of writing—before he returned to teaching or pursuing another career.

It took him a month to write Blue City.  
 
The plot is simple, a variation on one of the classic plot lines: “a stranger comes to town.”  Johnny Weather, Jr., is not, however, a complete stranger to the “Blue City,” an otherwise unnamed city somewhere in the Midwest. Weather grew up in the city, where his dad ran a nightclub and casino. At the beginning of the story, Johnny, discharged from the army and with no particular life plans, comes back to town, not having seen his father since he was 12, when he and his mother moved away from the city. He discovers that his father had been murdered two years previously, and the murder has remained unsolved. His father also had married a much younger woman shortly before his murder. At the beginning of the book, the young widow, as well as the rest of the city, are at the mercy of a corrupt syndicate of gangsters, politicians, and crooked cops who use blackmail, threats, and violence to run the city.

The novel has a compressed timeline—about 18 hours—during which Weather single-handedly discovers his father’s murderer as well as dismantles most of the criminal structure of the city.

The writing is simple and the plot unwinds in a straightforward manner. Early on, Weather says, “I came here to look for a job, and I found one waiting for me—the job of finding out who killed my father.” There also are some sharp details in the writing. Here, Millar describes the criminal kingpin, Roger Kerch, in his office in the nightclub: “Kerch was sitting at the desk counting money. His small, white hands moved quickly among sheafs of green bills, like little naked birds in a garden of good things to eat. His wrists bulged out thick above his hands, as if someone had bound his hands and blown air into the rest of him.”

Weather is not shy about picking a fight and the book has many terse action scenes and dead bodies— “6 corpses in 18 hours is the violent score in ‘Blue City’” reads the blurb on the back of the Dell paperback version I own. On the surface, the quick brutality of the novel matches the tenor of another hard-boiled icon who made his debut in 1947—Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Nevertheless, Millar’s scholarly background can’t help but come through in the book—literary references abound. One character is reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class when Weather comes to call. Weather’s stepmother refers to herself as part of Hemingway’s lost generation. The mayor of the city has volumes by William James and André Malraux on a desk in his study.

Blue City is not a landmark in the genre of American mystery fiction. It received mixed reviews.  “Very, very tough, and a little silly, too,” wrote the book critic for the New Yorker. Anthony Boucher, then just starting his career as a significant critic and supporter of the mystery genre, wrote, “Mr. Millar is to be congratulated on his sharp pose, his absorbing tempo, and above all on his ability to create a hardboiled hero who is not a storm trooper.”

Although the book is nothing special in the mystery genre, the publication of Blue City had two significant impacts on American publishing. First, Millar proved to himself that he could make a living by writing. No, it wasn’t the “serious” fiction that he aspired to, but would soon abandon. Nevertheless, it was a living. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Blue City was published by Alfred Knopf, among the most prestigious names in publishing, and also the publisher of Hammett, Cain and Chandler. Knopf encouraged Millar to continue writing in the hard-boiled style.

Even without Knopf’s encouragement, Millar had started another thriller. “By God I’ll fall back on my thrillers rather than not be published,” he wrote a friend. “Writing badly is only the second sin in my book; not being published is the first.” He had decided to try his hand at creating a private detective.

After many revisions, and title changes, Millar published The Moving Target in 1949, featuring southern California detective Lew Archer. Millar would write 18 Lew Archer novels, most published under his better-known pseudonym “Ross Macdonald.” In the pantheon of American mystery fiction, many consider the triumvirate as Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald.

The official corruption and contorted family ties that featured in Blue City were common elements in Millar’s Lew Archer novels. Over the years, Macdonald became a favorite of many writers outside of the mystery genre. He had a particularly close relationship, professional and personal, with Eudora Welty. She wrote a glowing review of one his books in the New York Times, and he dedicated one of his last Lew Archer novels to her.

Millar published his last book, The Blue Hammer, in 1976. He was already exhibiting symptoms of what later was diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 1983 at the age of 67.

(Thanks to Tom Nolan’s “Ross Macdonald” (1999)  for biographical background.)


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it