His first drafts were begun in 1947, using the working title of The Snatch; its style was meant to be a refinement on hardboiled fiction, featuring a successor to Philip Marlowe.

[3] The new title derived from a conversation that Archer has in the novel with a young woman who describes the craving for excitement and risk-taking of her post-war generation as being like driving fast in hope of meeting "something utterly new.

Anthony Boucher greeted the novel enthusiastically in The New York Times Book Review: "Human compassion and literary skill returns the much-abused hard-boiled detective story to its original Hammet-high level.

He is hired by the crippled wife of millionaire Ralph Sampson to discover what has happened to him since he disappeared after recently landing at Burbank Airport.

On the way back, Archer drops in on a run-down bar called The Wild Piano and listens to a boogie performance by convicted addict Betty Fraley.

Among other things that emerge about Sampson is that Troy is his business associate and that he gifted a mountain hunting lodge to a religious cult leader called Claude as a temple.

Eventually it emerges that Sampson and Troy have been using it as a drop-off point to smuggle illegal Mexican immigrants over the border and then hire them out at low pay rates to local ranchers.