Millar than Macdonald

Ross Macdonald was born Kenneth Millar (1915-1983), in California. His parents were originally Canadians, and they returned to Canada while Kenneth was still a child. Millar completed his undergraduate studies at the University Of Western Ontario (1938). He next studied at the University of Michigan, receiving a MA in English in 1943. Millar then began PHD work at Michigan, which culminated in a doctoral thesis on Coleridge (1951).

It was during his time as a graduate student that Millar began to write and publish crime novels. The pseudonyms John Macdonald, John Ross Macdonald, and finally Ross Macdonald, would come later. Millar's career as a novelist began under his given name, with The Dark Tunnel in 1944.  Blue City belongs to this grouping, published in 1947.

II.

Johnny Weather returns from the war to his home town an angry young man.  "I hadn't had a fight for a long time, and I was spoiling for one." <1>  It doesn't take long for Johnny to get his wish. He gets to dance the very first bar he wanders into. "'Shut up or I'll hit you again! With both hands.' My left split his upper lip and my right closed his left eye. 'See what I mean?' [Johnny said]".

Johnny next gets the news that his father's been murdered.  When he starts poking around into the unsolved crime, he finds corruption everywhere he turns. There is drug-dealing, prostitution and blackmail. The police and the city government have been bought by criminals and gangsters. Even more troubling for Johnny, though, is the realization that his father J.D. Weather had been complicit in the town's venality. "I had always thought my father was the straightest man in the Middle West."

III.

Scenes of pulpish violence accumulate as Johnny goes looking for his father's killer, in a town that now reminds him of the "suburbs of hell". Millar's use of the noir style brings both Hammett and Chandler to mind. But perhaps also owing to Millar's academia background, we get passages as the following.

People "moved and regrouped in a slow enormous Bacchic dance." There is a photo of "Friedrich Engels, surveying with a cold eye the chaotic symbols of the civilization he had criticized." The noise of cars below a window is a "muffled obbligato of impermanence." A personal bookshelf carries the titles of James's Psychology and Malraux's La Condition Humaine. Other writers are characterized, as "the lubricity of Rabelais, the immorality of Flaubert, the viciousness of Hemingway".

IV.

The Macdonald Lew Archer series would follow soon after this novel, to Millar's much greater fame. But Blue City bears interest, on its own.
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<1>Millar, Kenneth. Blue City. 1996 Chivers Press Edition.