Santa Barbara served as the model for the fictional city of Santa Teresa, where a good number of Archer novels and stories take place. I replaced the cityscape with some Spanish Mission style buildings from Santa Barbara. Tom Nolan offered the suggestions of including the Warner Brothers water reservoir and the Santa Barbara Courthouse clock tower since Hollywood factored into the Archer canon quite often, and because Ken Millar and his wife, Margaret Millar (also a mystery novelist), were known to frequent court sessions in Santa Barbara. The courthouse seemed like a perfect replacement for the couple embracing--the basic shape worked pretty well in the space and was more in keeping with the Archer tales. While Lew Archer wasn't depicted as a eunuch, romance played a relatively small role in the oeuvre. More often, the books dealt with Oedipal themes and lost children. Because I changed Archer's revolver to a fountain pen, it became especially important to render the shooting vignette pretty much "as is" to make it clear that this book contained crime stories, and to retain a strong visual link to the original image. After receiving his copies of The Archer Files, Tom Nolan wrote to tell me: "I remember Joe Gores saying how seeing (and reading) The Name is Archer changed his life; how he was hooked by its cover, and 'that grey-faced guy with the gun.' Maybe some grad student somewhere will be hooked too now by 'that grey-faced guy with the fountain pen.'"