As Donald L. Westlake points out in his Introduction, Return Trip Ticket "honorably continues and extends" the timeless myth of the tarnished knight and the tarnished damsel, a myth that influenced much of the work of writers such as Dashiell Hammett. Wilson, Hall's private detective, is the tarnished knight - a tired realist on a hunt for a wandering daughter. The young woman has been living in Barcelona, idly "taking courses." When she leaves her apartment and her casual communication with her family ceases, her wealthy father engages a detective agency to find her. Since Wilson is fairly fluent in Spanish, if not Catalan, the agency sends him to find Elizabeth Dantry. The search takes him into some odd nooks and crannies of Barcelona, into the haunts of some questionable associates with whom Elizabeth had become entangled, and into the fringes of a murder case. He finally catches up with Elizabeth in the southwestern United States, holed up in a shabby desert motel, where he finds that his job - far from over - has really just begun. No longer her pursuer, he is impelled to help her in her flight. This is a novel of chase and a novel of character, written with a rare skill and intensity of atmosphere. The tensions between the disillusioned, middle-aged, overweight detective and his troubled quarry are those of personality not sexual attraction - and are all the more compelling for that. Return Trip Ticket was originally published in Spanish to high praise. Readers in this country will quickly see why they deserve access to it in the author's original version.