The protagonist: a loose cannon, stumbling through adventures, out raged by corruption. The story strains credibility. Despite all that,the book served it purpose, providing a distraction from current politics, puzzling in misdirection. The ending encourages the reader to write another chapter. Ross MacDonald continues to entertain.

This stand alone novel is the earliest Ross MacDonald currently in print to the best of my knowledge, though his third published. Better than a lot of late 40's noir I've read, but not yet MacDonald at his best.

Narrated in the first person by WWII vet John Weather returning to his hometown in 1946 to visit his father, who he's not spoken to since he was twelve. When he arrives, he finds strangers apparently in control of his father's businesses, and sets out immediately (in the middle of the night) get to the bottom of things.

The novel plays out over a fairly short period of time. Less than 48 hours I think, with the narrator proceeding pretty much directly from one encounter to the next. I'm not the type of reader who makes any effort to try and "solve" the mystery before the detective, but in my opinion MacDonald did a good job of keeping my suspicions shifting around.

The narrator seems a little verbally aggressive, and many of his quips seem a bit random, but the story is enjoyable. While it's not bad by any stretch, I'd recommend anyone new to MacDonald start with one of his later books. At his best I think MacDonald is the best of the Hammett - Chandler - MacDonald trio, and I'd hate to see anyone write him off based on just this novel. So by all means include it if MacDonald's to your taste, but don't start here.

Of the Ross Macdonald novels written before the first Lew Archer mystery was published, Blue City is perhaps the one that most closely follows the Lew Archer formula. It features an aggresive protagonist who does double duty as narrator. The protagonist is essentially a loner who, over a relatively short period of time, repeatedly risks his neck to solve a mystery that is much more complicated than initial appearances suggest.
Except in this case, the protagonist and narrator is a 22 year old youth named John Weather. John is wise beyond his years. His degree of erudition and use of language seem to be that of a much older individual and this tends to detract from Blue City's believability. (Of course, in certain exceptional cases, a 22 year old could sound like someone in his forties or fifties. Think, if you will, of the young Orson Welles.)
In any event, John Weather returns to his hometown after a prolonged absence only to find that his father has been murdered and that the city is being run by thieves. Lots of hardboiled action, including several killings, rapidly ensues. In the last few pages, the precocious Mr. Weather identifies his father's killer and sets the stage for clean municipal government.
Though at times preachy, Blue City is a worthwhile read especially for those who are already Ross Macdonald fans. It's an important work in tracing the evolution of both the Lew Archer character and the books he appears in.

Early, early Macdonald. Not as psychologically dense as the Lew Archer books that followed, but compares well to Hammett's Continental Op stuff

Love the tone this book set from the git go. Excellent Macdonald book to start with if your a newbie.

Quick read. I think this was his first novel and I know his writing improved. This is not a Lew
Archer novel.

a

Ross MacDonald (real name Kenneth Millar) wrote in the forties and fifties. He is best known for his Lew Archer novels about a hardboiled private eye. He is often linked to Hammett and Chandler and considered their heir.

“Blue City” is MacDonald’s 1947 stand-alone novel about John Weather’s return to his hometown (which I don’t think is ever named in the 247-page book). The name Weather is appropriate because this book is as dark, shadowy, and hardboiled as any book could be. Just as in Gil Brewer’s 1957 book “The Angry Dream,” which obviously followed MacDonald’s “Blue City” by a decade, the story is about a young man who returns to his hometown after many years to find his father dead, to find that his father was hated by everyone in town, and to find that the town has turned dark and corrupt and nasty. But, while Brewer set his young man in a small-town in the country, MacDonald sets John Weather in a dark city.

John Weather has not seen his father since age twelve when his parents split up. He always held it against his father and, after his mother died, Weather drifted from town to town and signed up for the European theater in World War II, spending years shooting enemies and haunted by the memories. Weather has now come back to his hometown, to perhaps make amends with his father and to perhaps find work. Within hours after his return, he finds from an old man in a saloon, that his father died two years earlier, that his father brought crime, gambling, and corruption to the city, that his father had married a sexpot of a young lady closer to Weather’s own age and who inherited everything, and that the town is as corrupt as they come with every cop on the take and every citizen scared to speak out. Alone in this town, with almost every hand raised against him, Weather starts poking around and determines that his mission is to find out who killed his father and root out the corruption at its heart.

Weather is an unusual hero in that he is angry and cynical and has few moments of charm. In fact, what is amazing about the book is how dark and squalid and foreboding every page is. I can’t recall even one minute of sunshine in the book. It is not just hardboiled, it is extra-hardboiled. If I were to criticize one thing about this book, it would be that it is perpetually dark and sinister.

The cynicism begins on the first page with Weather, who narrates in the first-person, talking about how when you’ve been away from a town where you lived as a kid, you think about it and talk about it as if the air there “were sweeter in the nostrils than any other air.” But, the City started sooner than he expected it to and had “crawled out along the highway.” The truckdriver Weather caught a ride with is asked if he likes the town and Weather is told that “It’s all right if you don’t know any better places.”

Weather is itching for a fight and he finds one around just about every corner. This book is filled with action and Weather is pushing ahead on each and every page with almost no let up in the action. Weather is angry that no one seems to have investigated his father’s murder and he is getting up in everyone’s face about it, throwing out accusations of cover ups.

Weather’s new stepmother is something else entirely. “She had her legs, and the way she moved her body. In her dark silk dress she moved with the free, shining fullness and flow of a seal in water.” “Her live, stirring body in that still room was like a snake in a sealed tomb, fed by unhealthy meat.” Weather thinks about how her body “seemed lost in a dream of its own power and beauty” and how he could “have reached out and taken it” “like a ripe fruit from a tree. But then she was my stepmother,” he explained, “and that would be incestuous. Besides, I hated her guts.”

This book is as hardboiled as it gets. It is well written. The prose is unbelievable and it may be among the best of MacDonald’s work. The story takes the reader through nightclubs, poolhalls, barroom brawls, shootouts, and crime and corruption. The only possible ray of light in the whole deal is a whore with a heart of gold.

The whole story takes place over the course of a day or two and within the confines of the Blue City. Even when Weather is dumped at the outskirts and told to start walking toward Chicago, he has to head back in and finish this deal.

This is good writing. It is raw and powerful. And it is hardboiled fiction the way it was really mean to be. Highly recommended.