| From the back cover of first
Pocket Book edition: 'Lew Archer was hired to find Galley Lawrence. Her roommate described Galley as 'crazy for men' and without discrimination. When last seen she was driving off with petty gangster Joe Tarantine. That fact led Lew to a mob boss who offered him 10 G's for Tarantine - dead or alive. And Archer had uses for ten grand so he took the job. Through slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, Archer traced the hidden trail. Some of the people were dead when he reached them. Some were broken, and some, like Ruth, the blonde delinquent, were babes lost in an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. Their lives - and their murders - made a nightmare pattern, but the pattern finally made sense to a hard boiled detective whose job was unravelling the bitter and deadly ways of twisted human emotions.' |
Click here to see another cover. |
| Trivia: Millar used two ficticious cities in his novels, and The Way Some People Die is set in one of them, Pacific Point, south of Los Angeles. The other city was Santa Teresa, a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Both resembles Santa Barbara in terms of social stratification, but Pacific Point is 'a little more touched by the Orange County feeling.' Millar tried to alternate the Santa Teresa and Pacific Point settings to avoid getting stale. Later on, Sue Grafton have let her private detective Kinsey Millhone live and work in Santa Teresa. She have also provided the city with some history and suburbs. The resemblance of Santa Barbara is still there. |
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