The Doomsters is the seventh Lew Archer novel and the one in which Macdonald fixed the Archer character as well as the major themes which would occupy him for the rest of his writing career. Gone are the remnants of Hammett and Chandler; Macdonald had discovered his own milieu and his own voice. From The Doomsters on, the books were pure Macdonald.

California has always provided for Macdonald a litmus of American life, the place where the future of American began. Up to The Doomsters, the Archer novels had created the familiar California terrain which characterizes Macdonald's work. It is the most current of American landscapes, on the edge of the future, and yet California has attachments to the past which extend tentaclelike, both anchoring and restricting history's movement into the present. As with other Archer books, The Doomsters begins long before the novel opens and...