Blue City was one of four early nonseries novels which Macdonald wrote before hitting his stride with the Lew Archer books. For the most part these first works were designed as one-off books in which we can now see Macdonald experimenting with various formats in search of an authentic voice.

The fact that he began writing crime novels perhaps destined him to evolve his prose into a series as had his most obvious predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The connections between Blue City and Red Harvest with their "color" titles, loner protagonists, and plot similarities suggest that Macdonald was familiar with Hammett's work and the softened private eye, Lew Archer, indicates that he also knew of Chandler's. All that was left for him to discover was the right locale in Southern California and his voice in Archer for the series to begin in earnest.