Ross MacDonald's The Doomsters

"That's when I consider my more serious work started. With The Doomsters." From an interview with Ross MacDonald in It's All One Case, p. 234.

I recently read It's All One Case, the collection of interviews conducted by Paul Nelson with Ross MacDonald. It only came out last year, though the interviews were conducted in 1976. The book is filled with pictures, of Ross MacDonald and his wife mystery writer Margaret Millar, and of what seems like must be every cover ever issued of any Ross MacDonald language in any of half-dozen languages. A wonderful book if you're a Ross MacDonald fan. It's been suggesting things for my reading list for a month or more now.

The Doomsters is the first of the MacDonald books I've reread since; I hadn't read The Doomsters in a while. It really is the beginning of the great period for MacDonald, the series of novels of the late 50s and 60s that generally center around broken families and troubled children. The Galton Case. The Zebra-Striped Hearse (my personal favorite). The Wycherly Woman.

Who knows what changes a good writer into a great one? (If I knew the formula, I'd use it myself, and then make it available to others on generous terms...) Unfortunately, one of the possible causes for MacDonald was, at the time he was writing this, stress. There was trouble with his own daughter. Linda Millar, aged 16 in 1956, had struck and killed a young boy with her car, then drove off, and an hour later, crashed in the rear of a second car. She was drunk at the time. She was confined to a state mental hospital for a period. Her trial was moved to adult court, where she was convicted, but given a sentence of probation. There were a couple of suicide attempts. All three members of the family underwent psychoanalysis. It was a notable event in what was a life of trouble for Linda. Linda Millar died, of what was probably a drug overdose, at age 31. [Details from Ton Nolan's biography of Ross MacDonald.]

Some of these events are transformed, but still recognizable in The Doomsters. It starts with Archer having a troubling dream, from which he wakes to someone knocking at his door. Carl Hallman has come to ask for help, with a recommendation to Archer from a person he won't name. Hallman has just escaped from the state mental hospital, and Archer agrees to help, but only if Hallman will agree to return to the hospital while Archer invetigates. But they don't get there: Hallman overpowers Archer, knocks him out, and takes his car. Archer carries on investigating on Carl Hallman's behalf anyway.

There's trouble in the past: Hallman's mother died, a presumed suicide after two earlier attempts. Hallman's father died more recently, in what seemed a bathtub accident. There's trouble in the present: Hallman's older brother is shot, with his mother's gun, then his sister-in-law. The family is wealthy and who gets the money is a concern. There are also doctors, well-intentioned and not; psychiatrists; mental health case workers; private nurses. As the deaths pile up and/or get reconsidered, Carl Hallman is the prime suspect, but Archer more out of intuition than for any thought-out reason thinks that presumption is wrong. That doesn't stop the corrupt local sheriff from rounding up a vigilante mob.

There's a successful final twist or two, and the plotting is good, but it's not the plotting that makes this one great; it's the troubled complexities of the family that make this one feel so much more substantial. Very highly recommended.

And it counts for the golden age mystery challenge. I'm going to go with hand holding weapon in the hands of what I assume is a groovy Seventies version of Archer on my cover.

Golden Age. Hand Holding Weapon. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Novels

Titus Groan,  the first of the Gormenghast novels, begins thus, with a description of the castle:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Not very inviting prose, I agree. I made a list of words I was going to need to look up as I read: abactinal, clowder, anile, fuscous, spilth, marcid, scorbutic. Et cetera, et cetera. And I see now as I type my spell-checker thinks only fuscous and scorbutic are even words, but my OED was happy to give me definitions for all of them.

And yet the book shows up regularly on lists of great novels. I don't know any longer which list led me to purchase it, but I suspect it was Anthony Burgess' list of best English-language novels from 1939 to 1984 that appeared in the New York Times. And now that I've read it, I'd have to say he may be right.

There are three novels in my edition, plus a critical apparatus. It's from The Overlook Press and it came out in 1995 with two introductions, one by Burgess and one by Quentin Crisp. It seems to be out of print now. The novels center around Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In the first, Titus Groan (1946), Titus is born, and at the age of one year and a bit, he becomes the earl when his father goes mad and dies, well, is eaten by owls. It's that kind of book. In the second, Gormenghast (1950), Titus ages from seven to eighteen or so, and leaves the castle. In the third, Titus Alone (1959), he wanders the world outside Gormenghast. Peake planned at least a fourth, and there are a few pages of it, but he was unable to finish it, dying at the age of 56 from either Parkinson's or dementia.

The main psychological tension is between the traditional ritual that the earl of Gormenghast must perform and the desire for freedom, for life. But at the same time, at least in the first two volumes, there is considerable physical tension, mostly supplied by Steerpike, who starts as a kitchen boy and ends up (with a few murders along the way) as the Master of Ritual, the most important position, outside of the family, in the castle. Titus and his mother's hunting and killing of Steerpike provides the climactic finish of the second volume. You might not guess it from the quote above, but Peake writes very well about scenes of violence and suspense.

He can also be very funny. In the second volume Titus goes to school with an array of comic pedants; after the first headmaster dies a ridiculous death--he dies standing on his head as a result of a school prank gone too far--Bellgrove becomes the headmaster, mostly known for a pain in his teeth and falling asleep in class. The sister of castle's medical doctor Irma Prunesquallor decides to throw a party with the primary intention of finding a husband; she invites the entire teaching staff of the school, all male, as the only available pool of men of neither too high nor too low a class for her to choose from. Irma and Bellgrove both come to the party determined to get married, and by the end of the party, the pact is done. She knows nothing about his teeth, and he knows nothing about the hot water bottles she was using to pad out her cleavage. The marriage is, of course, no particular success.

But especially surprisingly to me, Peake is also capable of tenderness, and this ill-starred union is treated gently.

It's all very good, really, while it's good. Unfortunately Titus Alone is not up to Peake's earlier standard. The dementia that would kill him nine years later was already making itself felt in 1959. But it's also, I think, the case that the tension of the first two novels was wound up by the need to escape the rituals of Gormenghast, and once Titus does escape, the spring was slack. I don't know. But it's certainly the case that I finished the third (shorter) novel, only because the first two were so great.

Anyway, like the fine bottle of wine it is, it's been aging on my shelf for ten years. And I figured not everything I read for my TBR challenge can be 200 pages. It's two-thirds very highly recommended, but give yourself some time to get into it.

How To Write A Blog Post (R.I.P. Barry Stiefel)

My friend of 20+ years Barry Stiefel recently passed away from a heart attack. He was just fifty-five and it's a bit of a shock. We always had dinner when I was in the Bay Area, and he came up to Toronto to visit a few times. We had long, long, long phone conversations maybe eight times a year. He once said I was his best friend, and I felt bad that I couldn't really say the same in return. But, and of course it's absurd to make such enumerations, he was in the top five.

He maintained a huge complex of websites; I was rereading his blog at The Gentleman Economist, where he posted fairly regularly for a few years until he took a new job and was short of time. While he never convinced me of his libertarian/laissez-faire economic position, that didn't matter: he was always willing to engage in discussion, and was more than willing to listen to alternative views, and occasionally even be persuaded by them. He was Republican-leaning until about the Iraq war, but then that changed. The last time we talked we both were appalled and amused by the Trump administration. I would have expected him to call me to cluck the very day Anthony Scaramucci was fired.

In reading through old posts at The Gentleman Economist, I found this, a post on how to write a blog post, and I thought, as I was trying to do more with my blog, I could learn from this. Barry's blog posts were always punchy and amusing, even if I didn't always agree with his politics. But this is funny and astute and it's who Barry was. He didn't read poetry, he said, but then he quotes Robert Service's Dangerous Dan McGrew. I don't know what his website is backed by; unfortunately I suspect it will all disappear as soon as the payment expires. So I've just copied the whole thing and I'm reposting it here. But should it matter, the following is copyright Barry J. Stiefel, 2014:

How to Write a Blog Post 

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Gentleman Economist 

1.  Start with a strong declarative sentence that leaves some things unsaid:It doesn’t have to be “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon“, but you get the picture.
2.  Reward the curious:Include lots of facts and insider information.
3.  Reward the well-read:Subtle references to shared cultural touchstones or recent events bring your reader into the inner circle.
4.  Earn your reader’s attention, never demand it:Your readers aren’t your subordinates, children, students or constituents.  You can’t force them to read on.
Remember that with every page you’re serving, you’re competing with the Back button.
5.  Don’t waste your reader’s time:Do your homework, get your facts straight, think clearly and then write clearly.
Eliminate extra words.  It’s OK to imply things; people who get it will feel superior.
Eliminate anything that makes the reader stop and back up. If you can’t read it aloud without tripping, it’s not finished.
6.  Reward the linguistically facile:Use punchy language.  Include clever turns of phrase and the occasional double entendre.
7.  Reward the thoughtful:Have an opinion and state it clearly.  Those who agree and those who disagree will both appreciate it.
8.  Finish with a strong close:A short, simple, declarative sentence that implies an opinion is best.
9.  The real goal of writing a blog post is to whet the reader’s appetite for more:At the end, they should say “That was interesting, thought-provoking, and it didn’t waste my time”.

That’s all you need.  Get to work.

Rest well, Barry. (A strong close, I hope.)