I've been avidly collecting the work of the legendary hard-boiled detective fiction writer, Ross Macdonald since 1983. It was a dream come true when I was presented with the opportunity to create the cover design and illustration for the new, definitive collection of Lew Archer short stories, from Crippen & Landru Publishers called The Archer Files, edited by the award-winning Macdonald biographer, Tom Nolan. I chose to use the original 1955 Bantam paperback original with cover illustration by Mitchell Hooks (shown above) as the basis for my cover, but that wasn't the first idea I started with.