The Name Is Archer

[4] The name of the detective brought in there to locate a missing Hollywood starlet is Joe Rogers, although that was changed to Lew Archer in the Bantam anthology.

However, when the story was later adapted for the CBS television series Pursuit in 1958, Macdonald insisted that its private eye should retain the name Joe Rogers and the episode was retitled "Epitaph for a Golden Girl".

[5] At the time he wrote the story, Macdonald was still under the influence of Raymond Chandler and made his detective, like Philip Marlowe, "a cultured man with a healthy sense of humor".

The critical concept of suspending disbelief is discussed in Biographia Literaria[9] (the work on which Macdonald was ultimately to write a thesis), but is borrowed from Aristotle's literary theory, and is the first of three successive references to Ancient Greek literature.

Millicent Dreen provides the next allusion when she remarks that "apron strings don't become me", adapting the title of the recent play-cycle Mourning Becomes Electra, which Eugene O’Neill had based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

[11] The detective was originally named Sam Drake and the action is set in San Marcos, a place "surrounded by the mountains that walled the city off from the desert in the north-east" that is based on Santa Barbara, the Californian town where Macdonald had moved.

[12] When he came to revise the story for the Bantam anthology, a fist fight with the bodyguard replaced its romantic sub-plot and Drake's name was changed to Archer.

Elements from the rejected story, including verbatim conversations, names of characters and the theme of an elderly gangster's gun moll, were later recycled in Macdonald's next piece of magazine fiction, "Gone Girl", which was published after the appearance of The Ivory Grin.