On a deeper level than I'd been willing to recognize till now, I experienced fear. Fear of the treacherous darkness around us and inside of us, fear of the blind destruction that had wiped out most of a family and threatened the rest.
--Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters (Knopf, 1958)
Private detective Lew Archer exemplifies the neuroses of the 1950's, when families are breaking apart in suburbia under the pressures of greed, alcohol and drugs, all of which are in great supply in The Doomsters. In this novel we learn a little bit about Archer's past -- his youth, his job as a cop, his marriage to Sue that ended in divorce.. A friend from the past escapes from a mental institution and Archer tries to take him back. The friend, Carl Hallman, steals Archer's car and escapes. This plunges Archer into the multiple family troubles of the Hallman family and their sinister doctor, in a corrupt suburban county where the Hallman family confiscated land from a Japanese family who had been place in a camp during the war.
Archer is beaten several times and is attracted to several women along the way, all of whom already have other attachments. Carl's brother is killed and the hunt is on for Carl, Meanwhile other bodies are appearing as it becomes increasingly clear that Carl's parents did not die from suicide (his mother) and a heart attack (his father) and Archer tries to figure things out.
The Doomsters has a less confusing plot than some others of Macdonald's Lew Archer novels, perhaps because there's more of Archer's philosophical musings on the human condition and the good and bad in all of us. The novel is written effectively in the first person, so we only experience what Archer sees and hears.
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