This novel owes the most to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929), another novel with a returning soldier on a quest. It also owes something in general to Hammett's hard-boiled, nononsense prose style, and to the atmosphere of corruption and moral ambiguity which dog the pages of Hammett's books. Macdonald made good use of the objective and understated treatment which Hammett, Hemingway, and Chandler helped to establish as the American prose style between the wars. It was a style based on the patterns of American speech and captures something of the drive and experience of the country.

Macdonald also borrowed from Hammett his tendency to incorporate understated poetic and symbolic overtones in his prose, as well as the use of the detective story to present the vision and ambition of a major novelist. Macdonald, and Hammett before him, found that crime fiction could be stretched beyond...