The Doomsters

The Doomsters
First edition
Author Ross Macdonald
Country United States
Language English
Series Lew Archer
Genre Mystery novel
Publisher Knopf
Publication date
 1958
Media type Print (Hardcover, Paperback)
ISBN 9-997-51958-2
OCLC 1376657
Preceded by The Barbarous Coast
Followed by The Galton Case

The Doomsters is a 1958 mystery novel by American writer Ross Macdonald, the seventh book in the Lew Archer series.

Plot summary

Archer is hired by drug addict Carl Hallman to investigate the deaths of his wealthy and influential parents. His mother died in a drowning several years earlier, and his father, a Senator, died more recently. Carl claims to have been sent to a mental hospital by his older brother to prevent him from exposing the family's dark secrets, and escaped to contact Archer. Carl's brother dies in a shooting that is blamed on Carl, and a manhunt for Carl ensues across the family's vast orange orchards and surrounding property. The more Archer investigates, the more suspects he finds for the trio of deaths that haunt the Hallman family.

The title of the book is taken from the poem To an Unborn Pauper Child by Thomas Hardy.

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.[1]

The poem reflects on the difficulty of escaping the lot to which we are born and this is an underlying theme of MacDonald's book.

Reception

Many sources agree that this book marked a turning point in the series, wherein Macdonald abandoned his imitations of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and found his own voice. It also marks the fixing of Lew Archer's character as a man more interested in understanding the criminal than in catching him. Macdonald himself described and The Doomsters and its follow-up The Galton Case (1959) as the books where after a decade as a professional novelist he felt most satisfied with his writing.[2]

Writing about the book in The New York Times, the critic Anthony Boucher called the book a study of the strands that shape complexity and doom and, talking about these strands, says "it is an analysis at once compassionate and cruel giving dimension and meaning to an unusually well crafted mystery puzzle,".[3]

References

  1. ↑ http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-an-unborn-pauper-child/
  2. ↑ Paul Nelson and Kevin Avery (2016). It's All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives. Fantagraphics.
  3. ↑ Boucher, Anthony (February 23, 1958). "Criminals at large". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 January 2009.


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