I was very interested in what Macdonald had to say about Blue
City and Black Money, as I happened to read them both at
about the same time. Thanks for the quotes, Rich.
In fact, I picked Blue City to read as it was the earliest
Macdonald I had on hand. As it turns out, it was the first
hardboiled novel he wrote.
It is quite different from the Lew Archer books. First of
all, Lew Archer isn't in it. The narrator, Johnny Weather, is
just out of the army. His mother has died and he has returned
to his hometown to seek out his father, whom it hasn't seen
in a decade. One of the first things he hears is that is
father is dead, having been shot a year or so earlier. The
killer was never caught. Also, his father left a very young
widow.
So off he goes to find out who killed his father and why.
Along the way, he uncovers corruption from the mayor's office
on down through the police department, and his father was in
the thick of it. His father was a good man in many ways, but
there's no getting around the fact that in other ways he was
very bad. For example, he was generous and helped many
people. At the same time, he kept the unions out of town,
thus keeping down wages and maintaining poor working
conditions.
Many of the characters are a mix of good and evil, doing evil
to achieve a "good" result. Yet most of the crimes are still
based on self-interest.
This book employs a different level of language than The
Chill or Black Money (both novels with a university
backdrop). Johnny Weather meets a lot of regular people in
bars and on the street. There's a lot more slang and some
cruder language than in the other books. But it was published
in 1947, so there's no comparison with contemporary
writers--no F word, for starters.
The plot was fairly convoluted and moved right along. I
thought it was a good read, if slightly old-fashioned.
My edition, a 1986 Bantam pb, shows Judd Nelson and Ally
Sheedy in "a major Paramount picture."
Karin
At 17:55 05/02/05, Richard Moore wrote:
>I must confess that I was unable to reread the
assigned text of BLACK MONEY,
>even though I lugged it through several states in
December. Then I found
>myself reading some of the Joseph Hansen's I had
missed after his death.
>
>Although I have a paperback somewhere of BLACK MONEY,
I couldn't find it so
>picked up a cheap copy of the omnibus ARCHER AT LARGE
that also includes THE
>GALTON CASE and THE CHILL. It might be of interest to
quote from the
>Macdonald introduction.
>
>"As I look over such alter books as THE CHILL and
BLACK MONEY, I'm struck by
>obvious changes in my work. When I took up the
hardboiled novel, beginning in
>1946 with BLUE CITY, I was writing in reaction
against a number of things,
>among them my strict academic background. The world
of gamblers and gunmen and
>crooked politicians and their floozies seemed realer
somehow, more central to
>experience than the cool university life I
knew.
>
>"In these later books, the academic life keeps
creeping back in. Its privileged upper world, like the
sub-world of professional crime, does have of course its
plots and counterplots, its knifings and its bloodless
assassinations, its politicians and players for high stakes,
its guilty lover. And the campus, which seemed in my prewar
youth to have a seductive lingering medieval unreality, has
become where it is at.
>
>"In BLACK MONEY, the corruptions of the world invade
a college campus and
>make themselves at home there. Perhaps because its
binocular view includes in a
>single pattern the pits of Las Vegas and the groves
of academe, some academic
>reviewers have considered BLACK MONEY anti-academic.
I'm afraid on the other
>hand it betrays how persistently academic my mind has
remained through
>twenty-six years of detective-story writing. In
either case, as university people
>become central figures in our society, they merit
unsheltered treatment in
>fiction as in life. The lords of the
military-industrial-complex may be as subject
> to tragic flaws as Shakespeare's kings.
>
>"The reader who comes to BLACK MONEY fresh from THE
GALTON CASE will notice similarities in structure, and in the
central characters. The boy from Canada and the boy from
Panama were intended to match and balance each other. But the
world, or my vision of it, darkened in the seven years that
elapsed between the two novels; and the Panamanian boy comes
to a worse end."
>
>THE GALTON CASE was published in 1959.
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