Targeting Archer at Readers

As I note in my latest piece for CrimeReads, today marks 70 years since the release of Ross Macdonald’s first Lew Archer private-eye novel, The Moving Target. To commemorate this anniversary, I have gathered together—and commented on—25 of the best and worst front covers that book has carried over its history. Those include the original, 1949 Alfred A. Knopf edition; two British publications that renamed Archer “Lew Arless”; Mitchell Hooks’ 1970s reworking of the series fronts; a couple of Italian giallo versions; and a Czech translation suggesting that the plot is a mash-up of the old TV shows Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and WKRP in Cincinnati.

I also offer this reminder of the tale’s multiple qualities:

All these decades later, The Moving Target still impresses with its vivid prose and carefully rendered characters, plus its plotting mix of greed, broken trust, and festering disillusionments. While it’s tougher and more cinematic than some of Macdonald’s 17 subsequent Archer novels, Target hints at what will become more obvious as the series progresses: the author’s interest in the psychological roots of criminal behavior.

The story finds L.A. private investigator Archer, a 35-year-old ex-cop with a sardonic streak (“Most of my work is divorce. I’m a jackal, you see”), being hired by the dysfunctional family of Ralph Sampson, an oil millionaire from “Santa Teresa” (a fictionalized Santa Barbara). It seems the alcoholic Sampson has vanished. His younger, paraplegic second wife figures he’s off on a bender, rather than having been kidnapped. But Albert Graves, a former district attorney and onetime Archer colleague, asks that she hire the P.I. to at least locate the man. It’s a task more easily assigned than accomplished, leading the shamus into a circle of suspects that include Sampson’s beguiling but drifting daughter, Miranda; Alan Taggert, the tycoon’s pretty-boy pilot and the elder Graves’ rival for Miranda’s affections; a sun-worshipping holy man, Claude, to whom Sampson gave a mountain retreat; as well as a downwardly mobile actress with an astrology bent, a forgotten piano player, low-IQ bruisers, and even human traffickers.

Again, click here to observe how different artists and photographers have introduced The Moving Target to readers.