The Doomsters (Lew Archer, #7) in Point Blank

Sep 14, 2024 Dave rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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. 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. ...more

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Feb 20, 2017 Jake rated it liked it

Shelves: mystery-thriller-crime

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 o ...more

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Mar 19, 2018 Justin rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2018, read-in-mar-2018, point-blank

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Point Blank Podcast Review (pointblankpodcast.com)

The Doomsters was published in 1958 and is the seventh book in MacDonald’s Lew Archer series, and arguably one of the best.

Opening line: “I was dreaming about a hairless ape who lived in a cage by himself. His trouble was that people were always trying to get in.”

It seems like a non sequitur at first, but by the end of the novel the hairless ape motif recurs to shed some light on its meaning.

The story takes place in central California, and start ...more

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