| From the back cover of third PocketBook printing: ''Talk fast'! the gunman said. 'You kidnapped Ralph Sampson,' Archer challenged him. 'Your man picked up the ransom money last night.' 'I never got any dough,' he sneered. 'Maybe one of your boys pulled a double cross,' the detective snapped. 'A hundred grand is a lot of money to small-timers like you.' A hundred grand is a lot of money. But Lew Archer knew kidnapers. And he knew that even a hundred grand wouldn't buy Ralph Sampson back alive. That price would have to be paid in blood. Archer only hoped it wouldn't be his own.' |
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| Trivia: The working title for The Moving Target was The Snatch, but that one had to be scrapped for obvious reasons. Alfred Knopf called it 'a perfectly impossible title of course, as I am sure you will understand.' After some hassle with his publisher, Millar suggested that they should try to publish it with a different title and under a pseudonym. 'John Macdonald' came from Millar's father, John Macdonald Millar, but was also partly because he didn't want to cash in on his wife Margaret's reputation. The name of Lew Archer came from Sam Spade's partner Miles Archer, and from the author of Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace. | |
