Miles Connolly, _Mr. Blue_

 I HAD NEVER heard of this until a few months ago when a student said she would like to write a senior thesis comparing it to The Great Gatsby. They were both written in the 1920s, are both set or partly set in New York City (some chapters of Mr. Blue are set in Boston), and both involve charismatic young men who are flush with money, full of big dreams, and meet early deaths. Sounded plausible, so green light on the senior thesis, and I proceeded to find a copy of the novel on the Abebooks site. 

Mr. Blue did not sell well upon its first publication in 1928; Connolly moved out to Hollywood soon after and had a long successful career as a screenwriter (working with Frank Capra, among others). He published a few other novels, but this one is the best known. It attained a kind of cult status among Catholic readers and has been more or less continually in print since its publication.

The novel is narrated as a reminiscence by a friend of Blue's who, like Nick Carraway, is sometimes fascinated, sometimes awed, sometimes baffled by his friend and subject. Blue, like Gatsby, seems omni-competent; he charms everyone he meets and seems perfectly positioned to make the most of whatever potentiality awaits in the booming days of the mid-1920s. 

While Gatsby's quest is eroto-romantic, however, Blue's is spiritual. According to the introduction (by John B. Breslin, S. J.) in my Loyola Classics edition, Connolly had been reading Chesterton's life of Francis of Assisi before writing the novel, and it's easy to see the novel as an answer to the question: what would a saint like Francis be up to had he appeared in an Eastern seaboard city in the 1920s? Some of the answer makes obvious sense (give all he has to the poor, try to start an order for doing good works, die in saving someone else's life), some not so much (formulating eccentric opinions about film and architecture). There is also some allowance for the utterly whimsical, like Blue's love of balloons and marching bands. And like Gatsby, he has an astonishing car.

I can't see Mr. Blue as a rival for The Great Gatsby's canonical status, though. Fitzgerald's novel has an extraordinary cast of supporting characters--the Buchanans, the Wilsons, Jordan Baker, Meyer Wolfsheim--but in Mr. Blue, only Blue himself gets any sustained attention. Nick Carraway is a good deal more interesting than Blue's nondescript biographer. As far capturing any of the adrenalized buzz of the Jazz Age, Connolly just isn't interested. 

Easy to see how it won cult status, though. Blue the character is original and enigmatic, a surprising hybrid of Gatsby and Ignatius O'Reilly.