What do you think?
Rate this book
Lew Archer #7
The Doomsters
Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of his parents, Senator Hallman and his wife Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint, but they’ve has been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid wealth. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty-dealing, the family seem to be on the receiving end of a karmic death-blow. With two dead already and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.Murder, madness and greed grace The Doomsters, where a tony façade masks the rot and corruption within.
251 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
81 people are currently reading
833 people want to read
About the author
Ross Macdonald
159 books810 followersRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 167 reviews
December 18, 2025
INFERNO IN TERRA
Lew Archer arriva dopo Sam Spade e dopo Philip Marlowe, ma non li fa rimpiangere: è un magnifico esempio di investigatore privato.
Anche Lew è intriso di cinismo intinto nel disincanto, anche Lew è un solitario romantico donchisciotte della giustizia.
Archer è probabilmente meno ‘colorito’ dei detective di Hammett e Chandler, più dolce ed etico, addirittura a suo modo religioso (non si occupa di divorzi ☺) e quindi, forse, per qualcuno, più mammola.
Ma anche, probabilmente, più interessato all’aspetto sociale e sociologico dell’ingiustizia. Dice Archer:
Per ogni ranch con aria condizionata, piscina e pista di atterraggio privata, ci sono decine di bicocche di lamiera e di roulotte scassate in cui vivono orde perdute di lavoratori immigrati..
Si direbbe che sia più interessato a capire i criminali che a catturarli.
Lo stesso MacDonald dichiarò che il suo investigatore non è fine a se stesso, ma un mezzo per raggiungere un fine… Io tendo a servirmi della formula poliziesca per scrivere dei romanzi sulla vita americana.
Paul Newman e Lauren Bacall in “Harper - Detective’s Story.
Mi pare di capire che il grande Chandler era un po’ preoccupato dalla comparsa di MacDonald (pseudonimo di Kenneth Millar, assunto per non essere confuso con sua moglie che scriveva a sua volta romanzi polizieschi firmandoli col cognome del marito – scelta non del tutto felice quella di Kenneth, considerato che è un cognome diffuso anche tra gli scrittori di genere poliziesco, ci sono John D. MacDonald e Philip Macdonald), quasi Chandler temesse d’essere scalzato dalla classifica.
The Doomsters inizia con Archer che viene svegliato all'alba da un uomo conciato piuttosto male.
"Che cosa le è successo?", chiede Archer.
"Hanno ammazzato mio padre", risponde il tizio.
“Stanotte?
“Sei mesi fa".
Mi sembra un buon incipit, da acquolina in bocca.
Poi, si apprende che quest’uomo, Carl Hallman, è un tossico e vuole che Archer scopra come sono morti entrambi i suoi genitori, ricchi e potenti.
In italiano uscì col titolo L'inferno è in terra, è del 1958, e mi pare sia la settima avventura di Archer (la prima, invece, del 1948 è The Moving Target-Bersaglio mobile).
Si dice che sia stato un punto di svolta della serie, il momento in cui Archer si stacca dai modelli precedenti e assume maggior dimensione propria.
La allora 18enne Melanie Griffith in una delle sue prime interpretazioni: “The Drowning Pool-Detective Harper: acqua alla gola”.
Al cinema fu interpretato due volte da Paul Newman che pare preferì cambiare Archer in Harper perché credeva al potere scaramantico della H iniziale.
Sono due buoni adattamenti, Newman è magistrale come sempre: nel 1966 Harper-Detective’s Story di Jack Smight, e poi nel 1975, firmato dal bravo Stuart Rosenberg, The Drowning Pool-Detective Harper: acqua alla gola.
Archer è approdato in Tv in una serie di sei episodi nel 1975, interpretato da Brian Keith.
Lew Archer arriva dopo Sam Spade e dopo Philip Marlowe, ma non li fa rimpiangere: è un magnifico esempio di investigatore privato.
Anche Lew è intriso di cinismo intinto nel disincanto, anche Lew è un solitario romantico donchisciotte della giustizia.
Archer è probabilmente meno ‘colorito’ dei detective di Hammett e Chandler, più dolce ed etico, addirittura a suo modo religioso (non si occupa di divorzi ☺) e quindi, forse, per qualcuno, più mammola.
Ma anche, probabilmente, più interessato all’aspetto sociale e sociologico dell’ingiustizia. Dice Archer:
Per ogni ranch con aria condizionata, piscina e pista di atterraggio privata, ci sono decine di bicocche di lamiera e di roulotte scassate in cui vivono orde perdute di lavoratori immigrati..
Si direbbe che sia più interessato a capire i criminali che a catturarli.
Lo stesso MacDonald dichiarò che il suo investigatore non è fine a se stesso, ma un mezzo per raggiungere un fine… Io tendo a servirmi della formula poliziesca per scrivere dei romanzi sulla vita americana.
Paul Newman e Lauren Bacall in “Harper - Detective’s Story.
Mi pare di capire che il grande Chandler era un po’ preoccupato dalla comparsa di MacDonald (pseudonimo di Kenneth Millar, assunto per non essere confuso con sua moglie che scriveva a sua volta romanzi polizieschi firmandoli col cognome del marito – scelta non del tutto felice quella di Kenneth, considerato che è un cognome diffuso anche tra gli scrittori di genere poliziesco, ci sono John D. MacDonald e Philip Macdonald), quasi Chandler temesse d’essere scalzato dalla classifica.
The Doomsters inizia con Archer che viene svegliato all'alba da un uomo conciato piuttosto male.
"Che cosa le è successo?", chiede Archer.
"Hanno ammazzato mio padre", risponde il tizio.
“Stanotte?
“Sei mesi fa".
Mi sembra un buon incipit, da acquolina in bocca.
Poi, si apprende che quest’uomo, Carl Hallman, è un tossico e vuole che Archer scopra come sono morti entrambi i suoi genitori, ricchi e potenti.
In italiano uscì col titolo L'inferno è in terra, è del 1958, e mi pare sia la settima avventura di Archer (la prima, invece, del 1948 è The Moving Target-Bersaglio mobile).
Si dice che sia stato un punto di svolta della serie, il momento in cui Archer si stacca dai modelli precedenti e assume maggior dimensione propria.
La allora 18enne Melanie Griffith in una delle sue prime interpretazioni: “The Drowning Pool-Detective Harper: acqua alla gola”.
Al cinema fu interpretato due volte da Paul Newman che pare preferì cambiare Archer in Harper perché credeva al potere scaramantico della H iniziale.
Sono due buoni adattamenti, Newman è magistrale come sempre: nel 1966 Harper-Detective’s Story di Jack Smight, e poi nel 1975, firmato dal bravo Stuart Rosenberg, The Drowning Pool-Detective Harper: acqua alla gola.
Archer è approdato in Tv in una serie di sei episodi nel 1975, interpretato da Brian Keith.
March 1, 2019
Ross MacDonald is beginning to hit his stride in The Doomsters, but the book has too many imperfections to be considered among Archer's best.
Although the plot is good, the resolution takes too many pages of explanation, including an improbably lengthy monologue from the quadruple murderer, and the diction is occasionally imitative and unsure, sometimes bizarrely metaphorical like Chandler, occasionally libidinous like Spillane. There is still too much of Freud in Macdonald's Oedipus and Electra and too little of Sophocles, but Archer's viewpoint is already shifting from tolerance to acceptance, graced by humility and tinged with guilt.
As in The Barbarous Coast, it is in this development of Archer's viewpoint that The Doomsters makes its valuable contribution. In The Barbarous Coast, Lew tells us much about himself, but what he tells us is not tied closely to the action. The Doomsters is different, for here the unfolding plot gives Archer reason to be both humble and guilty: he comes to realize not only that lust has clouded his recent judgment, but that his own grief once caused him to ignore information which might have helped him clear up the initial crimes before they once again erupted into murder a few scant days ago.
By the end of this book, Archer's transformation is complete: he has become the detached, sympathetic observer of the later novels, watchful, but also wary of his own assumptions. In his next book, Macdonald would put it all together, creating his first masterpiece, The Galton Case.
December 2, 2021
I struck at his head with the automatic. He was a millisecond ahead of me. He swung the base of the telephone by its cord and brought it down like a sledgehammer on top of my head.
I got the message. Over and out.
One of the best entries in the series. An extremely important book in the Lew Archer series as we learn even more about Archer's past, his divorce from his wife Sue, and the events that led to molding Lew Archer's character for the good.
He wasn't always the morally strong, caring, fighter for righteousness and justice that we as readers know him to be. Once Archer was a shallow man.
...the slick polaroid picture that I had of myself as the rising young man of mystery who frequented beach clubs in the company of starlets...
It's another novel in the series where once again I was completely blindsided by the resolution. I never once suspected the person who turns out to be for all practical purposes a serial killer.
It's a stunning reveal and the murderer's motivation rivals those of any of the villains out of a Derek Raymond crime novel.
Certainly the most sophisticated entry in the series so far.I was an ex-cop, and the words came hard. I had to say them, though if I didn't want to be stuck for the rest of my life with the old black-and-white picture, the idea that there were just good people and bad people, and every thing would be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.
It was a very comforting idea, and bracing to the ego. For years I'd been using it to justify my own activities, fighting fire with fire and violence with violence, running on fool's errands while the people died: a slightly earthbound Tarzan in a slightly paranoid jungle. Landscape with figure of a hairless ape.
The novel ends with a radically altered Lew Archer. An Archer that brought to my mind Derek Raymond's self-doubting unnamed detective sergeant of London Metropolitan Police's Department of Unexplained Deaths.
Update 12/02/21:
This was the first of the Lew Archer novels that totally drew me into the Macdonald universe.
Reading Tom Nolan’s superb biography ROSS MACDONALD I’ve discovered why.
This is one of Ross Macdonald’s most autobiographical novels. His troubled daughter Linda had just done a three month stint in Camarillo after an alcohol induced traffic accident resulting in a death and horrible injuries.
She was an incorrigible little minx with a penchant for booze, drugs, and illicit sex.
This novel was Macdonald trying to work his way through his assorted family psychodramas.
This is where the entire Lew Archer series really took flight for me.
December 16, 2019
There is something about Ross Macdonald’s private investigator, Lew Archer, that stays with me after decades of other “private eyes” doing their work all over the world. His world is post WW II Southern California and this story says that he did a stint in “military intelligence” during the war.
Perhaps it takes a character like Archer to be willing to have a client like Carl, a refugee from a mental hospital, who wakes him up by pounding on his door before the crack of dawn. Carl is a troubled man who will only share that he was committed shortly after the death of his rich and powerful father six months before. He says it was his brother (and his brother’s scheming wife) who were behind sending him away but we learn that it was his wife who signed the commitment papers and this wasn’t Carl’s first time in a mental hospital.
The Lew Archer of this period stands in contrast to many of his contemporaries who are either part of the “hard-boiled” detective genre or the “noir” generation. Archer is inclined to be self-reflective and to dwell on his failures rather than on how tough he is or how he can out-clever the bad guys. There is a lot of emotion (and mood) in every Archer novel and The Doomsters isn’t an exception.
Carl has been a failure as an adult; a failure as a provider; a failure in any career; and a failure as a husband. Yet, when Archer “takes the case” by convincing Carl to go back to the hospital, we can empathize with his desire to dig into this puzzle of the rich and powerful perhaps taking advantage of the weak and insecure.
This is a more psychological approach to the genre than was the standard P.I. novel of this period. Archer has his own issues, such as his fixation on blonds that remind him of his ex-wife. He also has familiarized himself with the realm of mental disorders.
There is the dangerous mix of mayhem, corruption, race, sex and murder for Archer to sort through. Here are a few stylistic examples:
“I believe you said you heard the shots.”
“Yes. I heard them.”
“Where were you, at the time?”
“In my bathroom. I’d just finished taking a shower…If you want proof of that, examine me.”
“Some other time. Stay clean until then.”
And
“Come here, I said. I won’t hurt you. I ought to kick those big white teeth down your dirty yellow throat, but I’m not gonna. Come here.”
“You heard the sheriff,” Carmichael said, and gave the small man a push.
And threats sometimes result in violence (both to Archer and others). “A short broad man in a plaid shirt opened the front door and came in quietly. His smile was wide and meaningless under a hammer-in nose. A leather blackjack, polished like a keepsake, swung from his hand.
“Dutch, take this one out,” Maude said, standing away.
“I went around the counter and took Dutch out instead….I picked up his blackjack and moved past Maude through the inner door. She didn’t say a word.”
…
“Her ugly mouth said yah at me. Her left hand came out stiff, its carmine talons pointed at my eyes. It was more of a threat than an attempt, but it made me despair of our relationship.”
These are all features of Macdonald’s prose: Plenty of detail of people and things and a sardonic sense of humor that would remind some of my friends of how Dick Powell delivered his lines in his Richard Diamond series.
Yet, "at the end of the day," The Doomsters is a dated piece in which Archer looks at each of the women in terms of their pulchritude and there are enough racial slurs to make most 2020-era people uncomfortable. Furthermore, it reflects the period’s fascination with Freud and the “unconscious” and, while this is interesting, most will find that it, at times, bogs down the narrative. 3.5*
Perhaps it takes a character like Archer to be willing to have a client like Carl, a refugee from a mental hospital, who wakes him up by pounding on his door before the crack of dawn. Carl is a troubled man who will only share that he was committed shortly after the death of his rich and powerful father six months before. He says it was his brother (and his brother’s scheming wife) who were behind sending him away but we learn that it was his wife who signed the commitment papers and this wasn’t Carl’s first time in a mental hospital.
The Lew Archer of this period stands in contrast to many of his contemporaries who are either part of the “hard-boiled” detective genre or the “noir” generation. Archer is inclined to be self-reflective and to dwell on his failures rather than on how tough he is or how he can out-clever the bad guys. There is a lot of emotion (and mood) in every Archer novel and The Doomsters isn’t an exception.
Carl has been a failure as an adult; a failure as a provider; a failure in any career; and a failure as a husband. Yet, when Archer “takes the case” by convincing Carl to go back to the hospital, we can empathize with his desire to dig into this puzzle of the rich and powerful perhaps taking advantage of the weak and insecure.
This is a more psychological approach to the genre than was the standard P.I. novel of this period. Archer has his own issues, such as his fixation on blonds that remind him of his ex-wife. He also has familiarized himself with the realm of mental disorders.
There is the dangerous mix of mayhem, corruption, race, sex and murder for Archer to sort through. Here are a few stylistic examples:
“I believe you said you heard the shots.”
“Yes. I heard them.”
“Where were you, at the time?”
“In my bathroom. I’d just finished taking a shower…If you want proof of that, examine me.”
“Some other time. Stay clean until then.”
And
“Come here, I said. I won’t hurt you. I ought to kick those big white teeth down your dirty yellow throat, but I’m not gonna. Come here.”
“You heard the sheriff,” Carmichael said, and gave the small man a push.
And threats sometimes result in violence (both to Archer and others). “A short broad man in a plaid shirt opened the front door and came in quietly. His smile was wide and meaningless under a hammer-in nose. A leather blackjack, polished like a keepsake, swung from his hand.
“Dutch, take this one out,” Maude said, standing away.
“I went around the counter and took Dutch out instead….I picked up his blackjack and moved past Maude through the inner door. She didn’t say a word.”
…
“Her ugly mouth said yah at me. Her left hand came out stiff, its carmine talons pointed at my eyes. It was more of a threat than an attempt, but it made me despair of our relationship.”
These are all features of Macdonald’s prose: Plenty of detail of people and things and a sardonic sense of humor that would remind some of my friends of how Dick Powell delivered his lines in his Richard Diamond series.
Yet, "at the end of the day," The Doomsters is a dated piece in which Archer looks at each of the women in terms of their pulchritude and there are enough racial slurs to make most 2020-era people uncomfortable. Furthermore, it reflects the period’s fascination with Freud and the “unconscious” and, while this is interesting, most will find that it, at times, bogs down the narrative. 3.5*
December 15, 2024
Some people choose to live in an imaginary world for they are deprived of almost everything in the real one. And sometimes the line between sanity and insanity is fine. Any collision with reality might lead to crime. Lew Archer observing this family drama unfolding in front of his eyes wonders if the criminal is always the only person to blame.
June 14, 2021
Read and enjoyed it many years ago.
June 30, 2013
Beach week starting --
I've been reading these in sequence.
Macdonald has said that The Doomsters was his breakthrough book -- the one where he stopped simply writing genre and became... a writer. For most of this book, I didn't feel that it was working. There was still the clichéd writing of the 1950's genre, the plot was too complicated and a bit implausible..., the characters predicatbly flat... and nothing really seemed new.
Till about ch. 24 -- then, things did start to change... even so, I remained unconvinced until nearly the end, and the long monologue (no spoilers will be given here) brought everything together in a way that really was both new and disturbing - that is, in a way that was, as these things go, quite believable.
By the end, a very good book.
I've been reading these in sequence.
Macdonald has said that The Doomsters was his breakthrough book -- the one where he stopped simply writing genre and became... a writer. For most of this book, I didn't feel that it was working. There was still the clichéd writing of the 1950's genre, the plot was too complicated and a bit implausible..., the characters predicatbly flat... and nothing really seemed new.
Till about ch. 24 -- then, things did start to change... even so, I remained unconvinced until nearly the end, and the long monologue (no spoilers will be given here) brought everything together in a way that really was both new and disturbing - that is, in a way that was, as these things go, quite believable.
By the end, a very good book.
September 22, 2016
It's been a few years since I read a Lew Archer novel, but the end result is the same. Once I began, I was swept away and compelled to read, read, read. Macdonald is in great form here and every piece of this story is just about perfect. And the ending was a huge surprise to me.
I rarely hand out five stars, but this one deserves more than four. Consider this a 4 1/2 star rating.
I rarely hand out five stars, but this one deserves more than four. Consider this a 4 1/2 star rating.
May 12, 2023
09/2021
From 1958
Once again (like Find a Victim) it is not in his office that a case comes to Lew. In this he is visited at home by an escaped mental patient. He gets involved with the family and there are murders. The revelation of the killer is satisfying, the hows and whys. Archer thinks about his wife who divorced him.
From 1958
Once again (like Find a Victim) it is not in his office that a case comes to Lew. In this he is visited at home by an escaped mental patient. He gets involved with the family and there are murders. The revelation of the killer is satisfying, the hows and whys. Archer thinks about his wife who divorced him.
November 21, 2020
Carl Hallman, escaped mental asylum inmate asks Archer to look into his father's death. Archer has a thing for underdogs, so he decides to look it over even though Carl's relationship to sanity is almost the same as Fox News' to impartial journalism. Reports suggest the death was suicide, rumors suggest it was murder with Carl being the main suspect. The Hallman family is so dysfunctional that it would feel more comfortable in a Tennessee Williams play. Carl's cute, loyal wife; his money grubbing brother, the brother's vapid wife who has a lot of sex appeal and will rather exchange it for money. The town doctor and sheriff round off the cast. The former lacks morals, the latter both moral and sense.
Macdonald combines lurid melodrama with stifling atmosphere. As foreboding as a haunted mansion on a full moon night, or as lonely as a crypt, or as full of moral decay as the runover mongrel is full of flies. Mix your metaphors and take your pick, Macdonald's setting has got you covered. Most of the story takes place over the course of one night which further adds to it. Among hard boiled authors, Macdonald's plots are the best. The mystery has a nice solution with a special emphasis on motive behind the crime. However Macdonald is obsessed with Freudian theories and he seems hell bent on reducing culpability of the murderer. It rankled because the killer came across as pretty rotten to me.
Something seems to have clicked in place for Macdonald with The Doomsters. The themes he is most well known for - the sins of the father haunting the sons, families being gutted alive by their own past have never been more prominent or handled better. It is not surprising to learn that his most famous books would follow soon after. A further testament to his growth as a writer is his handling of Archer. Archer is a lot more introspective which gives him a humility that he was lacking. Chandler's Marlowe on whom Archer is based had that from the very start and is hence a much better character. So nice to see Archer finally becoming a viable alternative to my favorite hard boiled detective. Book #3 in the series showed similar growth and it is not a coincidence that one is my favorite so far.
The Archer books follow the same structure and are pretty consistent, so I rate them against each other on two main criteria. Firstly blatant shoehorning of genre cliches. Relatively weaker books in the series have detours into gun battles or such. This one is free of such distractions. And secondly the density of great lines. The prose is good throughout the series but better entries have more memorable lines. Examples. Old beauty and grace controlling her flesh, like an unforgotten discipline
She walked as if she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt
Big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck passing, hurry up and wait
The Doomsters should appeal to all fans of good crime fiction. A mystery fueled by the usual suspects of sex and money that nevertheless remains satisfying. The twin pillars of hard boiled school of crime fiction replicated faithfully - prose and atmosphere. And a protagonist that is tough and cynical yet moral and sympathetic. One of the best books in the series along with books #3 and #4. 4.5 will get rounded to 4 because I am saving 5 for personal favorites. Rating - 4/5
Macdonald combines lurid melodrama with stifling atmosphere. As foreboding as a haunted mansion on a full moon night, or as lonely as a crypt, or as full of moral decay as the runover mongrel is full of flies. Mix your metaphors and take your pick, Macdonald's setting has got you covered. Most of the story takes place over the course of one night which further adds to it. Among hard boiled authors, Macdonald's plots are the best. The mystery has a nice solution with a special emphasis on motive behind the crime. However Macdonald is obsessed with Freudian theories and he seems hell bent on reducing culpability of the murderer. It rankled because the killer came across as pretty rotten to me.
Something seems to have clicked in place for Macdonald with The Doomsters. The themes he is most well known for - the sins of the father haunting the sons, families being gutted alive by their own past have never been more prominent or handled better. It is not surprising to learn that his most famous books would follow soon after. A further testament to his growth as a writer is his handling of Archer. Archer is a lot more introspective which gives him a humility that he was lacking. Chandler's Marlowe on whom Archer is based had that from the very start and is hence a much better character. So nice to see Archer finally becoming a viable alternative to my favorite hard boiled detective. Book #3 in the series showed similar growth and it is not a coincidence that one is my favorite so far.
The Archer books follow the same structure and are pretty consistent, so I rate them against each other on two main criteria. Firstly blatant shoehorning of genre cliches. Relatively weaker books in the series have detours into gun battles or such. This one is free of such distractions. And secondly the density of great lines. The prose is good throughout the series but better entries have more memorable lines. Examples. Old beauty and grace controlling her flesh, like an unforgotten discipline
She walked as if she owned the world, or had owned it once and lost it but remembered how it felt
Big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck passing, hurry up and wait
The Doomsters should appeal to all fans of good crime fiction. A mystery fueled by the usual suspects of sex and money that nevertheless remains satisfying. The twin pillars of hard boiled school of crime fiction replicated faithfully - prose and atmosphere. And a protagonist that is tough and cynical yet moral and sympathetic. One of the best books in the series along with books #3 and #4. 4.5 will get rounded to 4 because I am saving 5 for personal favorites. Rating - 4/5
March 23, 2016
Something Archer and Philip Marlowe have in common is that they display the “wary good humour of men whose calling is death”. Okay, that description actually appears in this book attached to the otherwise inconsequential character of the deputy coroner, but I think it’s apt for both these California detectives. They are closed men, men in many ways shut off from the wider world, but they are able to keep up a string of patter when dealing with murder. Indeed it’s one of the more reliable weapons in their arsenal, used in questionings as a way to either create a rapport or cause heckles of tension. That’s not to say they’re glib, it isn’t to imply that they’re characters laughing in the face of brutal murder. No, they understand the seriousness of their trade, they know what murder means and the fact of it morally repulses them. But even with blood and death around them, they maintain that wary good humour and use it to their advantage. In comparison a Mike Hammer will respond with furious outrage, while for a Hercule Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes murder is more of an elegant parlour game. Both Archer and Marlowe understand the gravity, know the consequences, but unlike Martin Beck in the last mystery I read, they are not so ground down by it that the dialogue suffers.
‘The Doomsters’ isn’t actually the best Archer out there, or perhaps having read ‘The Chill’ my standards and expectations are just now way too high. For a long time it looks as if it’s a mess, with a frenetic set up, awkward pacing and an unwieldy set of characters. By the end it seems that there is more design to it than first meets the eye, but there remain a number of loose strands hanging out that really should have gone somewhere.
Having a quiet night at home, Archer is suddenly disturbed by Carl Hallman, an escaped mental patient who has been put onto Archer by a mutual friend. Carl is a troubled boy – whose parents have both died recently - and Archer tries to do the right thing by driving him back to the mental hospital. On the way though, Carl overpowers him and steals his car. When Archer wakes up he tries to track down the car, whilst still having sympathy enough for Carl to try to help him. However things get rapidly out of hand. Before long Carl’s estranged brother Jerry has been murdered and Carl is the main suspect. What follows is a sweaty and fast paced twenty four hours where Archer does his damndest to save Carl from a lynch-mob, while investigating the brother’s murder, the parents’ deaths and watching helplessly as other bodies pile up around him. In addition he has to contend with a bullying sheriff, a doctor who might not be as smooth as he seems, a nurse with a secret, an inquisitive reporter and various family members desperate with grief and their own self-interest.
If it sounds like a lot has been crammed in, then that’s because a lot has been crammed in. It’s a book where a disappointing number of characters are not given time to breathe (there’s also, which is more noticeable now than it would have been when it was written, a slightly dodgy Asian stereotype). Of course cramming so much plot in to a short space of time may have been an attempt by MacDonald to make something more fast paced and cinematic (as no Archer novel had been filmed by this point), but it ends up coming across as an interesting experiment which doesn’t quite work – a cramped novel, which needs more space to move around in.
At the end though MacDonald does something incredibly interesting (which I’ll do my best here to talk about, without revealing anything), creating a circle of guilt that is almost perfect in its roundness. A conversation takes place where a character accuses Archer of not listening to something many years before, alleging that if Archer had listened to it he could have stopped many of these tragedies occurring. Now though everything has come around and Archer finds himself at the end of a chain of events, with him solving the crimes and stopped any further tragedy. But if he’d had more patience and listened to that visitor to his office one afternoon years earlier, he could have stopped it all. Archer is the hero who has unravelled the mystery, but he's still made to feel as guilty as any of the other characters. It’s beautifully done and ties everything tight in a circle of flawed morality – with only the few stray ends to ruin the whole package. Mystery novels are sometimes criticised for not being like reality, as reality is far more messy. This book goes the other direction and tries to connect all the crimes and all the guilt together in one neat little bow. Yes it’s artificial and yes it’s nowhere near real, but you can’t help but admire the design.
‘The Doomsters’ isn’t actually the best Archer out there, or perhaps having read ‘The Chill’ my standards and expectations are just now way too high. For a long time it looks as if it’s a mess, with a frenetic set up, awkward pacing and an unwieldy set of characters. By the end it seems that there is more design to it than first meets the eye, but there remain a number of loose strands hanging out that really should have gone somewhere.
Having a quiet night at home, Archer is suddenly disturbed by Carl Hallman, an escaped mental patient who has been put onto Archer by a mutual friend. Carl is a troubled boy – whose parents have both died recently - and Archer tries to do the right thing by driving him back to the mental hospital. On the way though, Carl overpowers him and steals his car. When Archer wakes up he tries to track down the car, whilst still having sympathy enough for Carl to try to help him. However things get rapidly out of hand. Before long Carl’s estranged brother Jerry has been murdered and Carl is the main suspect. What follows is a sweaty and fast paced twenty four hours where Archer does his damndest to save Carl from a lynch-mob, while investigating the brother’s murder, the parents’ deaths and watching helplessly as other bodies pile up around him. In addition he has to contend with a bullying sheriff, a doctor who might not be as smooth as he seems, a nurse with a secret, an inquisitive reporter and various family members desperate with grief and their own self-interest.
If it sounds like a lot has been crammed in, then that’s because a lot has been crammed in. It’s a book where a disappointing number of characters are not given time to breathe (there’s also, which is more noticeable now than it would have been when it was written, a slightly dodgy Asian stereotype). Of course cramming so much plot in to a short space of time may have been an attempt by MacDonald to make something more fast paced and cinematic (as no Archer novel had been filmed by this point), but it ends up coming across as an interesting experiment which doesn’t quite work – a cramped novel, which needs more space to move around in.
At the end though MacDonald does something incredibly interesting (which I’ll do my best here to talk about, without revealing anything), creating a circle of guilt that is almost perfect in its roundness. A conversation takes place where a character accuses Archer of not listening to something many years before, alleging that if Archer had listened to it he could have stopped many of these tragedies occurring. Now though everything has come around and Archer finds himself at the end of a chain of events, with him solving the crimes and stopped any further tragedy. But if he’d had more patience and listened to that visitor to his office one afternoon years earlier, he could have stopped it all. Archer is the hero who has unravelled the mystery, but he's still made to feel as guilty as any of the other characters. It’s beautifully done and ties everything tight in a circle of flawed morality – with only the few stray ends to ruin the whole package. Mystery novels are sometimes criticised for not being like reality, as reality is far more messy. This book goes the other direction and tries to connect all the crimes and all the guilt together in one neat little bow. Yes it’s artificial and yes it’s nowhere near real, but you can’t help but admire the design.
November 2, 2022
To An Unborn Pauper Child
Late in Ross Macdonald's crime novel, "The Doomsters" the main female character, Mildred, remarks to Macdonald's redoubtable detective, Lew Archer, that "it was a hideous world, a crime to bring children into it." Mildred quotes the following lines of a poem to Archer to illustrate her point.
"Sleep the long sleep,
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here."
Archer says that "I don't know who wrote it, but I've never been able to get those lines out of my head."
The lines are from the opening stanza of the poem "To an Unknown Pauper Child" by the Victorian poet and novelist, Thomas Hardy. The poem turns to a cautious sense of hope in the final stanza:
"And such are we —
Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary —
That I can hope
Health, love, friends, scope
In full for thee; can dream thou’lt find
Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!"
Hardy's poem with its pessimism and hope captures the spirit of "The Doomsters" (1958), the seventh of Ross Macdonald's series of novels featuring the private detective, Lew Archer. "The Doomsters" marks a shift in the nature of the series. Instead of focusing on externally on crimes, their victims and perpetuators, Macdonald's novel turns inward and becomes almost metaphysical in its reflections. The Library of America, in its introduction to its collection of four Macdonald novels from the 1950s, says that "The Doomsters" "signaled a breakthrough in the Archer novels with its exploration of 'an alternating current of guilt' within a family", a breakthrough that would be continued in the subsequent novels in the series.
In the novel, Archer becomes drawn into the affairs of a large, wealthy, and doomed California family which owns a large orange grove. A young man who has escaped from a mental hospital seeks Archer's assistance in investigating the death of his wealthy father six months earlier. The story quickly expands to include the death of the mother of the family some years before. The scenario opens up into a tale of lust, unfaithfulness, and greed for the inheritance. Before the tale is over and the mysteries resolved, several members of the family, and others involved, will meet violent deaths.
The novel explores the secrets, tensions, and guilt hanging over close family life, drawing heavily on both Freud and on the ancient Greek dramatists. Lew Archer is also drawn into the story in his own behalf and not merely as a detective. He had contact with some of the characters in the story years before at a time when his own marriage was crumbling as a result of unfaithfulness and alcohol abuse. His investigations awake sad memories of his own life. Of the many Lew Archer novels, "The Doomsters" is probably the one that tells the reader the most about the detective's past life.
The novel is quickly paced and its complex story is relatively easy to follow. The book moves sometimes uneasily between its plot and its story of crime on the one hand and its interiority and reflections on its characters on the other hand. The mystery reaches its denouement in two lengthy scenes with a great deal of talking involving two of the primary characters. Overall, the story of the crime and the reflections on the nature of good and evil make for a provocative, if uneasy, fit and move the book beyond the level of a crime novel. In the final scene of the novel, another important female character tells Archer:
"Since I've been doing hospital work, I've pretty well got over thinking in terms of good and bad. These categories often do more harm than -- well, good. We use them to torment ourselves, and hate ourselves because we can't live up to them. Before we know it, we're turning our hatred against other people, especially the unlucky ones, the weak ones who can't fight back. We think we have to punish somebody for the human mess we're in, so we single out the scapegoats and call them evil. And Christian love and virtue go down the drain." Archer agrees with this sentiment and concludes on the novel's final page: "We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it."
"The Doomsters" is the third novel in the Library of America's compilation of four Ross Macdonald novels from the 1950s. The volume in its turn is part of a three volume compilation of Lew Archer novels. I have been enjoying and learning from the development of the crime novel in Macdonald's hands through the series. Among many other things, I learned of the Thomas Hardy poem that gave the novel its title and theme through editor Tom Nolan's notes at the end of the book.
Robin Friedman
Late in Ross Macdonald's crime novel, "The Doomsters" the main female character, Mildred, remarks to Macdonald's redoubtable detective, Lew Archer, that "it was a hideous world, a crime to bring children into it." Mildred quotes the following lines of a poem to Archer to illustrate her point.
"Sleep the long sleep,
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here."
Archer says that "I don't know who wrote it, but I've never been able to get those lines out of my head."
The lines are from the opening stanza of the poem "To an Unknown Pauper Child" by the Victorian poet and novelist, Thomas Hardy. The poem turns to a cautious sense of hope in the final stanza:
"And such are we —
Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary —
That I can hope
Health, love, friends, scope
In full for thee; can dream thou’lt find
Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!"
Hardy's poem with its pessimism and hope captures the spirit of "The Doomsters" (1958), the seventh of Ross Macdonald's series of novels featuring the private detective, Lew Archer. "The Doomsters" marks a shift in the nature of the series. Instead of focusing on externally on crimes, their victims and perpetuators, Macdonald's novel turns inward and becomes almost metaphysical in its reflections. The Library of America, in its introduction to its collection of four Macdonald novels from the 1950s, says that "The Doomsters" "signaled a breakthrough in the Archer novels with its exploration of 'an alternating current of guilt' within a family", a breakthrough that would be continued in the subsequent novels in the series.
In the novel, Archer becomes drawn into the affairs of a large, wealthy, and doomed California family which owns a large orange grove. A young man who has escaped from a mental hospital seeks Archer's assistance in investigating the death of his wealthy father six months earlier. The story quickly expands to include the death of the mother of the family some years before. The scenario opens up into a tale of lust, unfaithfulness, and greed for the inheritance. Before the tale is over and the mysteries resolved, several members of the family, and others involved, will meet violent deaths.
The novel explores the secrets, tensions, and guilt hanging over close family life, drawing heavily on both Freud and on the ancient Greek dramatists. Lew Archer is also drawn into the story in his own behalf and not merely as a detective. He had contact with some of the characters in the story years before at a time when his own marriage was crumbling as a result of unfaithfulness and alcohol abuse. His investigations awake sad memories of his own life. Of the many Lew Archer novels, "The Doomsters" is probably the one that tells the reader the most about the detective's past life.
The novel is quickly paced and its complex story is relatively easy to follow. The book moves sometimes uneasily between its plot and its story of crime on the one hand and its interiority and reflections on its characters on the other hand. The mystery reaches its denouement in two lengthy scenes with a great deal of talking involving two of the primary characters. Overall, the story of the crime and the reflections on the nature of good and evil make for a provocative, if uneasy, fit and move the book beyond the level of a crime novel. In the final scene of the novel, another important female character tells Archer:
"Since I've been doing hospital work, I've pretty well got over thinking in terms of good and bad. These categories often do more harm than -- well, good. We use them to torment ourselves, and hate ourselves because we can't live up to them. Before we know it, we're turning our hatred against other people, especially the unlucky ones, the weak ones who can't fight back. We think we have to punish somebody for the human mess we're in, so we single out the scapegoats and call them evil. And Christian love and virtue go down the drain." Archer agrees with this sentiment and concludes on the novel's final page: "We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it."
"The Doomsters" is the third novel in the Library of America's compilation of four Ross Macdonald novels from the 1950s. The volume in its turn is part of a three volume compilation of Lew Archer novels. I have been enjoying and learning from the development of the crime novel in Macdonald's hands through the series. Among many other things, I learned of the Thomas Hardy poem that gave the novel its title and theme through editor Tom Nolan's notes at the end of the book.
Robin Friedman
May 31, 2017
In the last noir I read, The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley, I had an epiphany about noir. They are masculine romances, explorations of how men view women. One might even say they’re critiques of the male thirst for feminine sympathy. That stuff gets you killed, man. I further claimed that noir offers a specific set of roles for their female characters, reflecting the various ways that men view women: the LOVER; the HOUSEKEEPER; the TEMPTRESS; the MOTHER; & the penultimate role, the core of masculine romance, the LIGHTHOUSE.
I’m pleased as plum to discover that this categorization absolutely NAILS the next noir I read, which is this one, The Doomsters. Turns out I wasn’t just making stuff up! *fist pump*
So basically, our detective-hero Lew Archer gets woken up early in the morning by a banging at his door. It’s Carl Hallman, recently escaped from a mental asylum, who wants to hire Detective Archer to investigate the death of his father, a wealthy politician and landowner. Cue a twisting narrative of murder, corruption, and greed. And, of course, the staple of female characters:
The wife of Carl Hallman’s brother Zinnie is our TEMPTRESS, a “hard blonde beauty fighting the world with two weapons, money and sex.” Carl’s long deceased (a suicide…?) mother is the MOTHER, who fits that type as perfectly as a puzzle piece. Mrs. Hutchinson is the HOUSEKEEPER and is also, literally, the housekeeper because men are too busy murdering, being murdered, investigating murder, and/or sleeping with the TEMPTRESS, the LOVER, or the LIGHTHOUSE to be dealing with things like child rearing. The LOVER is Rosie, a “well-groomed brunette” always giving people warm, bright looks and a social worker at Carl Hallman’s mental hospital. And last, our star, our LIGHTHOUSE, is Mildred Hallman, wife of Carl himself, introduced like so:
“She was young and small, with a fine small head, its modeling emphasized by a short boyish haircut. She had on a dark business suit which her body filled the way grapes fill their skins.”
& “She listened with her head bowed, biting one knuckle like a doleful child. But there was nothing childish about the look she gave me. It held a startled awareness, as if she’d had to grow up in a hurry, painfully. I had a feeling that she was the one who had suffered most in the family trouble.”
& “She spoke with a kind of wilted gallantry. I looked at her. She’d leaned her head against the cracked leather seat, and closed her eyes. Without their light and depth in her face, she looked about thirteen. I caught myself up short, recognizing a feeling I’d had before. It started out as paternal sympathy but rapidly degenerated, if I let it. And Mildred had a husband.”
I’ll not go beyond that, but as I wrote when I first created this idea of the LIGHTHOUSE, her ultimate fate is the core statement of this particular noir. Is she true or false? Innocent or guilty? Victim or culprit? The answer to these tells us something a little bit more about this version of the LIGHTHOUSE, though let me say this: It always fails, as it must, though sometimes failure is a wonderful thing.
This book, however, isn’t a wonderful thing. I mean, look, it’s a perfectly serviceable noir specimen. And if I didn’t have any other noir authors to compare it with, I’d probably have a much higher opinion of it. Alas I do have such comparisons – Chandler, Crumley, Morgan, Hammett – and amongst the works of these authors, The Doomsters comes in last. The problem is that there’s just not much going on between the pages. No description or setting to transport you into a milieu. This book is set in some generic California agricultural town. No characters – nothing like the beer drinking bulldog in Crumley’s Last Good Kiss or the Jimi Hendrix hotel AI in Morgan’s Altered Carbon – that stick with you. No deeper themes beyond sin and the wages of sin to push this noir tale beyond its genre. No real social commentary. By contrast, take this monologue from Chandler’s The Long Goodbye:
Thought provoking and quite relevant in this age of the annual new iPhone release. You won’t find any such incisive social commentary in The Doomsters. The closest it ever comes is subtle one-liners like “On a screen behind her a male announcer, not so male, was telling women how to be odorless and beloved.”
So… yeah. The Doomsters is in a tough place. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it was enjoyable to read. It’s just, if I’m going to recommend noir, this one would be at the bottom. I’d say Chandler’s The Long Goodbye or The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely first. Then I’d suggest Morgan’s Altered Carbon, if you’re a fan of sci-fi (or even if you’re not – it’s great). Then if you’re still looking for more, grab Hammett & Crumley. And only then would I say The Doomsters. Perhaps Ross Macdonald’s other works fare better.
But this one, yeah, *shrug* it's neither LIGHTHOUSE nor LOVER nor even TEMPTRESS. More like HOUSEKEEPER. It gets the work done but not much more than that.
I’m pleased as plum to discover that this categorization absolutely NAILS the next noir I read, which is this one, The Doomsters. Turns out I wasn’t just making stuff up! *fist pump*
So basically, our detective-hero Lew Archer gets woken up early in the morning by a banging at his door. It’s Carl Hallman, recently escaped from a mental asylum, who wants to hire Detective Archer to investigate the death of his father, a wealthy politician and landowner. Cue a twisting narrative of murder, corruption, and greed. And, of course, the staple of female characters:
The wife of Carl Hallman’s brother Zinnie is our TEMPTRESS, a “hard blonde beauty fighting the world with two weapons, money and sex.” Carl’s long deceased (a suicide…?) mother is the MOTHER, who fits that type as perfectly as a puzzle piece. Mrs. Hutchinson is the HOUSEKEEPER and is also, literally, the housekeeper because men are too busy murdering, being murdered, investigating murder, and/or sleeping with the TEMPTRESS, the LOVER, or the LIGHTHOUSE to be dealing with things like child rearing. The LOVER is Rosie, a “well-groomed brunette” always giving people warm, bright looks and a social worker at Carl Hallman’s mental hospital. And last, our star, our LIGHTHOUSE, is Mildred Hallman, wife of Carl himself, introduced like so:
“She was young and small, with a fine small head, its modeling emphasized by a short boyish haircut. She had on a dark business suit which her body filled the way grapes fill their skins.”
& “She listened with her head bowed, biting one knuckle like a doleful child. But there was nothing childish about the look she gave me. It held a startled awareness, as if she’d had to grow up in a hurry, painfully. I had a feeling that she was the one who had suffered most in the family trouble.”
& “She spoke with a kind of wilted gallantry. I looked at her. She’d leaned her head against the cracked leather seat, and closed her eyes. Without their light and depth in her face, she looked about thirteen. I caught myself up short, recognizing a feeling I’d had before. It started out as paternal sympathy but rapidly degenerated, if I let it. And Mildred had a husband.”
I’ll not go beyond that, but as I wrote when I first created this idea of the LIGHTHOUSE, her ultimate fate is the core statement of this particular noir. Is she true or false? Innocent or guilty? Victim or culprit? The answer to these tells us something a little bit more about this version of the LIGHTHOUSE, though let me say this: It always fails, as it must, though sometimes failure is a wonderful thing.
This book, however, isn’t a wonderful thing. I mean, look, it’s a perfectly serviceable noir specimen. And if I didn’t have any other noir authors to compare it with, I’d probably have a much higher opinion of it. Alas I do have such comparisons – Chandler, Crumley, Morgan, Hammett – and amongst the works of these authors, The Doomsters comes in last. The problem is that there’s just not much going on between the pages. No description or setting to transport you into a milieu. This book is set in some generic California agricultural town. No characters – nothing like the beer drinking bulldog in Crumley’s Last Good Kiss or the Jimi Hendrix hotel AI in Morgan’s Altered Carbon – that stick with you. No deeper themes beyond sin and the wages of sin to push this noir tale beyond its genre. No real social commentary. By contrast, take this monologue from Chandler’s The Long Goodbye:
Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what is sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.
Thought provoking and quite relevant in this age of the annual new iPhone release. You won’t find any such incisive social commentary in The Doomsters. The closest it ever comes is subtle one-liners like “On a screen behind her a male announcer, not so male, was telling women how to be odorless and beloved.”
So… yeah. The Doomsters is in a tough place. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it was enjoyable to read. It’s just, if I’m going to recommend noir, this one would be at the bottom. I’d say Chandler’s The Long Goodbye or The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely first. Then I’d suggest Morgan’s Altered Carbon, if you’re a fan of sci-fi (or even if you’re not – it’s great). Then if you’re still looking for more, grab Hammett & Crumley. And only then would I say The Doomsters. Perhaps Ross Macdonald’s other works fare better.
But this one, yeah, *shrug* it's neither LIGHTHOUSE nor LOVER nor even TEMPTRESS. More like HOUSEKEEPER. It gets the work done but not much more than that.
April 3, 2020
Well this was a depressing read! It's as well-written, twisty, and engaging as the previous books, but also very bleak. This one went a little too deep into the pop psychology well for my tastes.
I had to knock off a star because at the core of this story, MacDonald spends a lot of time beating the proverbial dead horse that violent people *must* be crazy, therefore crazy people *must* be violent. I don't think there was one person in this novel that didn't have serious mental issues, and Archer himself indulges in some serious navel-gazing, ultimately believing that he shares in the guilt of the slaughter of the hapless Hellman family because he'd dismissed a kid from his office three years earlier, a kid who ended up being right in the middle of the mess. That went a bit too far for me. The people who killed the members of this family were sociopaths, not psychotic, though I suppose in the 1950s there wasn't much of a line drawn between such characteristics.
I had to knock off a star because at the core of this story, MacDonald spends a lot of time beating the proverbial dead horse that violent people *must* be crazy, therefore crazy people *must* be violent. I don't think there was one person in this novel that didn't have serious mental issues, and Archer himself indulges in some serious navel-gazing, ultimately believing that he shares in the guilt of the slaughter of the hapless Hellman family because he'd dismissed a kid from his office three years earlier, a kid who ended up being right in the middle of the mess. That went a bit too far for me. The people who killed the members of this family were sociopaths, not psychotic, though I suppose in the 1950s there wasn't much of a line drawn between such characteristics.
March 13, 2018
You get the feeling that he’s really hit the sweet spot for the series here, he knows his character, he’s stepped out from the shadows of Chandler and Hammett and he’s taking Archer to some dark psychological places. Pretty bleak all round too. Impressive.
Read
October 14, 2018Although I can’t remember anything about the plots of any of the Lew Archer books a week after I’ve read them, they do leave behind a thick residue of noirish good feeling. Truthfully, I’ve never read another series which sustained such an impressive average. MacDonald was a real talent.
November 14, 2017
My third read by Ross MacDonald still doesn't meet the quality of the first I read, "The Way Some People Die", but perhaps that is a standard effect when reading 3 works by the same author in 3 consecutive months. Still, often, Macdonald bats his psychological reasonings/ramblings right out of the ballpark: "I went to the piano and picked out a one-finger tune. I quit when I recognized it: "Sentimental Journey." I took the conch shell [on the piano] and set it to my ear. Its susurrus sounded less like the sea than the labored breathing of a tiring runner. No doubt I heard what I was listening for." Macdonald is an artist with his words, his books (well, I've only read three so far) the true beauties of the American mid-20th-century crime genre in my opinion.
May 16, 2023
Have I mentioned that I love a good noir?
While definitely not my favourite among Ross Macdonald's book, it was still very enjoyable. We have here all the things he loves so much - fucked-up families, everyone knowing everyone, femme fatales & innocent women (though which one is which is a matter for debate) and corrupt policemen.
The story itself is a bit far-fetched and Lew spends too much time as a passive witness, but it's immensely satisfying as all the pieces fall into place and everything clicks.
One more thing - I usually disagree with my wife when she says- that Ross Macdonald's books are very sexist (or it doesn't stop me from enjoying them) but in this book it was a bit too much, even for me.
While definitely not my favourite among Ross Macdonald's book, it was still very enjoyable. We have here all the things he loves so much - fucked-up families, everyone knowing everyone, femme fatales & innocent women (though which one is which is a matter for debate) and corrupt policemen.
The story itself is a bit far-fetched and Lew spends too much time as a passive witness, but it's immensely satisfying as all the pieces fall into place and everything clicks.
One more thing - I usually disagree with my wife when she says- that Ross Macdonald's books are very sexist (or it doesn't stop me from enjoying them) but in this book it was a bit too much, even for me.
February 20, 2017
Maybe there was something wrong with me. Maybe I have finally hit a wall with the Lew Archer series (perish the thought!) but I simply could not get into this one. It's still an Archer novel so it remains a quality mystery tale but from the start, this one felt weaker than others. It relies too much on expository dialogue rather than Archer's detective skills and the setting is too familiar (though again, that's on me as I've read the vast majority of the Archer series already). This one ranks on the lower end of the series for me, along with The Drowning Pool.
May 23, 2009
This is where the Archer books started to get really personal and hard, with everyone, including Archer, sharing a measure of the blame. One of the strongest entries in the series.
September 16, 2024
The Doomsters (1958) is the seventh novel in MacDonald’s Lew Archer series, yet we readers might still feel that we are barely scratching the surface when it comes to getting to know the elusive Archer. The Doomsters opens with one of the more unusual ways to meet a client with Carl Hallman, an escapee from a mental institution whose mind is all kinds of fuzzy, banging on Archer’s door. It seems Carl had been put in the institution by his brother, Jerry, after their father drowned in a bathtub. Jerry, now controlling the estate, was dominated by his wife, Zinnie, a blonde divorcee of uncertain origin, who had only married him five years earlier. Carl’s wife, Mildred, by contrast, thought she had been getting a whole man, but right at the start of the marriage, he had a nervous breakdown. Archer sees Carl as a handsome boy in trouble, a double threat to women if he needed mothering. Archer intends to do what seems logical since the boy is making little sense in that he agrees to investigate the father’s death, but as part of the deal Carl has to go back to the institution. The return of Carl gets bungled, however, when Carl chokes Archer and steals his car a few miles from the hospital. Archer then sets about trying to make sense of what it is all about by visiting the family while Carl who is rarely seen again in the book takes the fall for everything that happens, since it is easiest to blame murders on the crazy guy who escaped from the institution and is lurking in the woods.
Archer takes in the pretty postcard scenery, but feels like the trouble with him is that he is always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. He sees the darkness in people. He sees Zinnie so clearly as she switch-hips across the parlor. He notes that whatever she had been through had wiped out a certain crudity in her looks and left them pretty dazzling, but he hoped “it wasn’t the thought of a lot of new money shining in her head.” When she says that he does not like her, he says he hardly knows her and she responds not to worry, he never will. She scared him because she “was a hard blonde beauty fighting the world with two weapons, money an sex. Both of them had turned in her hands and scared her. The scars were invisible, but I could sense the dead tissue. I wanted no part of her.”
One of the great things about MacDonald’s writing is how well he can describe the essence of people and how understated so many of his descriptions are. Here, Zinnie is not just a femme fatale, but someone scarred, broken, and dangerous. He gets the reader to see very quickly what the essence of Zinnie is: “She exploded against me hissing like an angry cat, fled across the room to one of the deep windows. Her clenched hand jerked spasmodically at the curtains, like somebody signaling a train to stop.”
Archer is not really getting paid for his services in this one. When asked if he is expected to get paid, he says to forget about it for now. “Let’s just say I like the old-fashioned idea of presumption of innocence.” Archer is sometimes the guy tilting at windmills. He believes there is a concept of justice out there and he wants to help get to that place. But Archer later tells us that that he used to believe in a back-and-white picture – that there were just good people and bad people – back when he was a Long Beach cop. He had once thought that “everything wold be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.” But he now saw “a few finer shades” and that things were often more complicated than that. “When you looked at the whole picture, there was a certain beauty in it, or justice. But I didn’t care to look at it for long. The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there’d be nothing left of it, or you. We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.”
As with many other Archer novels, the Doomsters revolves around family troubles and secrets from the past. Archer is tilting at windmills, but he wants to know the truth even if it is darker than he thought. Along the way, he finds that people are darker in the their hearts than he might have originally supposed. He tells Dr. Grantland at one point that Grantland fell in love with Zinnie as soon as she got within one death of five million dollars, but the problem for him was that she was now one death past it and no good to anybody, particularly him.
Archer takes in the pretty postcard scenery, but feels like the trouble with him is that he is always turning over the postcards and reading the messages on the underside. He sees the darkness in people. He sees Zinnie so clearly as she switch-hips across the parlor. He notes that whatever she had been through had wiped out a certain crudity in her looks and left them pretty dazzling, but he hoped “it wasn’t the thought of a lot of new money shining in her head.” When she says that he does not like her, he says he hardly knows her and she responds not to worry, he never will. She scared him because she “was a hard blonde beauty fighting the world with two weapons, money an sex. Both of them had turned in her hands and scared her. The scars were invisible, but I could sense the dead tissue. I wanted no part of her.”
One of the great things about MacDonald’s writing is how well he can describe the essence of people and how understated so many of his descriptions are. Here, Zinnie is not just a femme fatale, but someone scarred, broken, and dangerous. He gets the reader to see very quickly what the essence of Zinnie is: “She exploded against me hissing like an angry cat, fled across the room to one of the deep windows. Her clenched hand jerked spasmodically at the curtains, like somebody signaling a train to stop.”
Archer is not really getting paid for his services in this one. When asked if he is expected to get paid, he says to forget about it for now. “Let’s just say I like the old-fashioned idea of presumption of innocence.” Archer is sometimes the guy tilting at windmills. He believes there is a concept of justice out there and he wants to help get to that place. But Archer later tells us that that he used to believe in a back-and-white picture – that there were just good people and bad people – back when he was a Long Beach cop. He had once thought that “everything wold be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.” But he now saw “a few finer shades” and that things were often more complicated than that. “When you looked at the whole picture, there was a certain beauty in it, or justice. But I didn’t care to look at it for long. The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there’d be nothing left of it, or you. We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.”
As with many other Archer novels, the Doomsters revolves around family troubles and secrets from the past. Archer is tilting at windmills, but he wants to know the truth even if it is darker than he thought. Along the way, he finds that people are darker in the their hearts than he might have originally supposed. He tells Dr. Grantland at one point that Grantland fell in love with Zinnie as soon as she got within one death of five million dollars, but the problem for him was that she was now one death past it and no good to anybody, particularly him.
May 16, 2025
Being beaten up and robbed by a potential client might dissuade most detectives, but not Archer. He recognizes a suffering soul and doesn't like the way the law is tightening the noose around his neck. Yet again, and with little hope of payment, Archer is pulled into a decades-in-the- making family crisis--but this one brings a sordid episode from his own past smack into his face. Nobody does family trauma better than Ross MacDonald, but the family hurts are only the white-hot focal point of a galaxy of corruption that includes politicians, cops, doctors, and even the Japanese internment of WWII. This is MacDonald at his very best.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 1, 2020
The Lew Archer series is one of the great detective series ever written. Archer always finds himself investigating the dark core of family relationships. Whether it's greed, lust or jealousy which drives people to murder/ blackmail or both. In this a man who has escaped from an asylum appears on his doorstep asking for help.
June 8, 2017
Good twist to the plot near the end but for some reason, I found Lew Archer less likeable in this one.
May 6, 2018
Another Lew Archer mystery. The ending kind of brought this one down a notch for me. That and maybe the fact that there was pretty much one main suspect for me throughout most of the book. Usually Macdonald keeps my suspicions bouncing around. In the end, my suspect didn't turn out to be the main baddie, though they were definitely a baddie. The problem is more that Macdonald didn't really sell me on the solution as well as he could have. The solution is presented as a sort of big rambly mess, and didn't quite satisfy. The personal detail about Archer at the end was less out of place than it felt in Find a Victim, but the tie in of the main plot with Archer's past seemed a bit contrived. I don't know that Archer necessarily needs to be a peephole rather than a person, but I do wonder if his personal history wouldn't be best left sketchy rather than detailed.
October 13, 2009
Not a bad place to start on the Ross MacDonald path. Crime, pathology and mystery mixed with psychology (and psychiatry), philosophy, dependency, and the vagaries of guilt and denial. One of the many MacDonald books that transcends the crime/mystery genre. He's a novelist, nothing less, and his work is addictive.
February 1, 2008
A real sea change in MacDonald's work, where he becomes more interested in the "why" than the "how" of a case. The compressed time frame adds real urgency, and the wrap-up is vivid and oddly touching.
April 17, 2009
The title taken from a Thomas Hardy poem (Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently, And though thy birth-hour beckons thee, Sleep the long sleep: The Doomsters heap; Travails and teens around us here), The Doomsters is perhaps the best example of Macdonald's ability to transcend the genre.
January 16, 2020
A very good Lew Archer novel, if not a great one. It's got all the elements of the really great later entries, but they somehow don't feel as tight and focused in The Doomsters.
The resolution does appear to come out of nowhere, and Archer just happened to be there to see it unravel and bear witness to a lengthy confession, rather than work things himself (though he does get part of the way himself. The final chapter does add a little nuance to the plot, and does make me think at re-reading might bring about a greater appreciation.
The resolution does appear to come out of nowhere, and Archer just happened to be there to see it unravel and bear witness to a lengthy confession, rather than work things himself (though he does get part of the way himself. The final chapter does add a little nuance to the plot, and does make me think at re-reading might bring about a greater appreciation.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 13, 2025
glaring redundancies & repetition that slipped past the author, agent, & editors. awkward interjections within dialogue & elsewhere. dated
but not bad
i expected more twists, turns, & didn't care much about the characters or outcome, but macdonald shows flashes of insight that tempt me to pick up his more lauded works
guess i'm a lit-fic guy at heart
but not bad
i expected more twists, turns, & didn't care much about the characters or outcome, but macdonald shows flashes of insight that tempt me to pick up his more lauded works
guess i'm a lit-fic guy at heart
Displaying 1 - 30 of 167 reviews