ROSS MACDONALD – Blue City. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1947, published under the author’s real name, Kenneth Millar. A shortened version was serialized in the August and September 1950 issues of Esquire. Dell #363, paperback, 1949? Reprint paperback editions are plentiful, most often published by Bantam under the pen name Ross Macdonald. Film: Paramount Pictures, 1986, with Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy. (See comment #4.)

   Another tale of a son seeking revenge for his father’s death. Johnny Weather returns to an unnamed Midwestern city after the war to discover that his father, one of the town’s crooked bosses, had been shot and killed two years earlier.

   It is the idealism of war versus the realities of city life, with its political corruption sanctioned by anti-union big business, that drives Johnny against the powers that have covered up the murder. His activities soon stir up a great deal of reaction, including a couple of particularly bloody murders, before he finds how far ambition can drive a man to guilt.

   A mayor running on a campaign of reform has found that ends often are confused with means, and convinces himself that murder, or rather assassination, can be justified.

   Weather comes on strong, though he did not really acre for his father, and it is this over-aggressiveness that is a bit too much to absorb. In the background, life is described as it went on after the war, in one of MacDonald’s earlier stories.

Rating: ****½

— Nov-Dec 1968.