Ross Macdonald: Blue City (USA 2011)

From the Publisher:
"My favorite... [Macdonald] is first among those novelists who raised the genre from its roots in pulp fiction to serious literature." -- P.D. James, from Talking About Detective Fiction

He was a son who hadn't known his father very well. It was a town shaken by a grisly murder-- his father's murder. Johnny Weather was home from a war and wandering. When he found out that his father had been assassinated on a street corner and that his father's seductive young wife had inherited a fortune, he started knocking on doors. The doors came open, and Johnny stepped into a world of gamblers, whores, drug dealers, and blackmailers, a place in which his father had once moved freely. Now Johnny Weather was going to solve this murder-by pitting his rage, his courage, and his lost illusions against the brutal underworld that has overtaken his hometown.

"Most mystery writers merely write about crime. Ross Macdonald writes about sin." -- The Atlantic

Ross Macdonald: Blue City. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, ISBN: 9780307740731 (January, 2011), 264 p., $15.00.

Ross Macdonald: Blue City (USA 1987)

From the Publisher:
"Ross Macdonald was crucial. None of us would write as well if we hadnt read him." -- Robert B. Parker (author of the Spenser novels)

"Drop it," Garland said from the doorway. "I'm getting pretty tired of you."
I hesitated a moment, holding the useless gun. He fired once and it flew out of my hand, leaving it numb. I looked at him and saw that he had done it from the hip. I could feel my nerve draining out of me like water....
"Take it easy," Garland said. "You almost got it that time. I can put a line of slugs right up your backbone like a punch machine."
"I know you're good," I said. "You don't have to keep telling me."
...My throat was busy resisting the fierce pressure of nausea... It may have been the slick of blood on the floor where my foot had slipped. It may have been the half-naked man in the corner with the discolored neck and dead, swollen face...
"Pretty, isn't it?" Garland said. "You see what happens to boys and girls that try to buck our organization."

Ross Macdonald: Blue City. Introduction by Robert B. Parker. Hill & Company, Rediscovery Books, ISBN: 0940595117 (October, 1987), 231 p., $9.95 (?).

Ross Macdonald: Blue City (UK 1981)

From the Publisher:
When Johnny Weather came out of the army he went home to Blue City and found his father murdered. The old man had been the biggest wheel in town, but the cops filed his murder neatly in a pigeonhole marked 'Unsolved.' And when Johnny went to his father's beautiful young widow for some answers, she offered to swap her beautiful young body for his silence. So Johnny Weather saw that the only way to clean the rottenness out of Blue City was with a blood bath...

Ross Macdonald records that he wrote Blue City in 1946 "in a kind of angry rapture". Like his hero, he had just come back from the war -- he had served in the navy -- and he describes the book as being 'about the underlife of an imaginary American city, abstracted from the several cities the war had taken me to'. Readers may well see in it the prototype of other cities, especially Californian ones, which he has since anatomized so skilfully, just as they will see in Johnny Weather an early version of private eye Lew Archer, though Archer did not make his appearance till The Moving Target (1949).

Blue City was the first of Ross Macdonald's novels to appear in England. It was published in 1949 under his real name of Kenneth Millar.

Ross Macdonald: Blue City. Collins, The Crime Club Famous First, ISBN: 0002310279 (October, 1981), 220 p., £?.??.

Ross Macdonald: Blue City (USA 1974)

From the Publisher:
TOWN GONE BAD
When Johnny Weather got out of the Army he went home to Blue City and found his father murdered...The old man was the biggest wheel in town, but the cops filed his murder neatly in a pigeonhole marked "Unsolved." And when Johnny went to his father's beautiful young widow for some answers, she offered to swap her beau- tiful young body for his silence. Johnny Weather saw that the only way to clean the rottenness out of Blue City was with a blood bath!

BLUE CITY
by Ross Macdonald
Bestselling author of the
Lew Archer novels "

"Very, very tough -- not for delicate stomachs!" -- Boston Globe

Ross Macdonald: Blue City. The town looked clean on top -- but underneath it was filthy with evil, big-city corruption and murder. New York: Bantam, 1974, Bantam Books #Q8375, 214 p., $1.25.

Ross Macdonald: Blue City (UK 1962)

From the Publisher:
Backside:
"TAKE IT EASY," GARLAND SAID.
"I can put a line of slugs right up your back like a punch machine." I didn't make the obvious retort. My throat was busy resisting the nausea that clenched my stomach. There was blood on the floor, a dead man in the corner-and a woman who lay on the table, the lamp shining on her bruised face. "Pretty, isn't it?" Garland said. "You see what happens to the boys and girls that buck our organisation?"

"Very, very tough -- not for delicate stomachs!" -- Boston Globe

Inside:
When Johnny Weather went home to Blue City, he found his father murdered. The old man was the biggest wheel in town, but the cops filed his murder "Unsolved". Powerful men looked the other way when Johnny asked vestions. A hoodlum tried to zill him for getting nosy. And when Johnny went to his father's beautiful young verdow jor some answers, she offered herself in exchange for his silence. Johnny Weather sare there was only one way to clean the violence out of Blue City -- WITH A BLOOD BATH....

"Just about as tough as they come!" -- SATURDAY REVIEW

Ross Macdonald: Blue City. The city looked clean on top, but underneath it festered -- all the way from Mr Big down to the lowest blackmailer. London: Corgi / Translworld Publishers, 1962, 230 p., 2'6.

Kenneth Millar: Blue City (USA 1950)

From the Publisher:
Graft and lust bring brutal violence to Blue City... The story of a desperate double manhunt.
6 CORPSES IN 18 HOURS IS THE VIOLENT SCORE IN "BLUE CITY"

Kenneth Millar: Blue City. A Story of Graft and Gore. New York: Dell, 1950, A Dell Book #363, 238 p., ¢25 (?).

Kenneth Millar: Blue City (UK 1949)

From the Publisher:
In 1946, after many years' absence, John Weather returns to Blue City to find that his father -- the onetime Mayor -- had been murdered on the street two years before. For political reasons among the conflicting forces which now rule the place, the murder has been hushed up and the murderer never found. The City as Weather finds it on his return, is one of evil and corruption, and corruption, as he also discovers, is something which once injected into a political organism is bound to spread. And this is what has happened in Blue City which is rotting from the top. It is an ugly City now, too ugly even for the men and women who have made it that way, and its corruption revolts John Weather into action on its own terms.

Kenneth Millar writes with uncompromising toughness and spares us no reality. His world is one of brutal values; his people without pity or remorse. But this is not toughness for the sake of toughness. It is a harsh and vivid picture of a brutal side of life, focused before us with pitiless clarity like a sudden light in a shameful room. And in the nakedness of its tearing reality and in a manner which is not easily forgotten, we are faced with the fearful implications of these people's lives, and a lingering disturbance for some sort of truth which they contain.

Kenneth Millar: Blue City. London: Cassell and Company, 1949, 230 p., 8'6.

Kenneth Millar: Blue City (USA 1947)

From the Publisher:
BLUE CITY
This is a fast-moving tough yarn written by a master of the art of the hardboiled murder mystery. It belongs on the list of which Cain, Hammett, and Chandler have long been ornaments.

John Weather came back from the war to find that during his absence his father -- one-time mayor of Blue City -- had been murdered. His stepmother is involved with some pretty unsavory characters. The police and local politicos are hardly above reproach, and all in all Weather has a rough time of it. But of course he wins through in the end.

KENNETH MILLAR
was born at Los Gatos, California, on December 13, 1915, of mixed Scotch-Canadian and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After growing up in western Canada he attended the University of Ontario, from which he was graduated in 1938. The day after his graduation he married a Canadian girl, who has written mystery stories and novels under the name of Margaret Millar. After a period during which he taught in high school and later held a fellowship at the University of Michigan, in 1944 he entered the Navy and became a commissioned officer on an escort carrier. Since his release from the Navy in the spring of 1946 Millar has been living in California with his wife and young daughter. He is the author of two mystery novels, The Dark Tunnel and Trouble Follows Me.

Kenneth Millar: Blue City. A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, 276 p., $2.50.