In French it appeared as Un Mortel Air De Famille (A deadly family likeness, 1964); in Turkish as Ölmek Yasak (Forbidden to die, 1972); in Finnish as Rouva Galtonin perillinen (Mrs Galton’s heir, 1981); and in Italian as Il ragazzo senza storia (Boy without history, 2012).

[1] Lew Archer is hired by attorney Gordon Sable on behalf of Maria Galton, Santa Teresa resident and widow of an oil millionaire.

Interviewing Lemberg's drunken wife, Archer learns that Roy and his violent brother Tommy had associated with a Reno mobster called Schwartz.

Sable now drives up to San Francisco to join Archer and they hear that a young man calling himself John Brown has recently arrived from the Detroit area in search of news of his lost father.

Back in Santa Theresa after hospitalisation, Archer finds that John Brown has been accepted by Mrs Galton as her grandson, although some still suspect him of being an imposter.

In Ann Arbor, Archer locates John's former girlfriend, who confides that his name was Theodore Fredericks and that he had been raised in the poor section of the Canadian town of Pitt, Ontario.

Archer also discovers that the Lemberg brothers are now using the house as a hide-out, but Tommy claims that he did not kill Culligan; he had only been sent to intimidate Alice Sable, who had run up gambling debts in Schwartz's casino.

He later mentioned in an interview that the book "is an imaginative reconstruction of certain aspects of my own life as a boy", but went on to clarify that this referred not to actual events so much as the sense of displacement, of not belonging, and it is this that he projects into the character of John Brown junior.

[7] But it may even be claimed that Macdonald shares in the fatherhood of his alter ego at a deeper literary level, when a poem titled "Luna" provides the vital clue to the destination of Anthony Galton after leaving home.

The poem is a tightly rhymed love lyric represented in the novel as published two decades before by a San Francisco literary figure named Chad Bolling, of whose hip jive and poetry performance at "The Listening Ear" Lew Archer gives a satirical account.

Although the satire is directed at the Beat Generation, of whose "sloppy aesthetics" Macdonald disapproved, the character is modelled on Kenneth Rexroth, the literary elder statesman who championed their work.