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 ...
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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 fa???ade masks the rot and corruption within.
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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 â�"
Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary â�"
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.
