7.8 /10 1 Votes7.8
Country United States ISBN 9-997-51958-2 Preceded by The Barbarous Coast | 3.9/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date 1958 Originally published 1958 Genre Mystery Publisher Alfred A. Knopf | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardcover, Paperback) Similar Ross Macdonald books, Crime Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Doomsters is a 1958 mystery novel written by Ross Macdonald, the seventh book in the Lew Archer series.
Contents
Plot summary
Archer is hired by drug addict Carl Hallman to investigate the deaths of his wealthy and influential parents.
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.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.
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,".