Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh Last Seen Wearing. Eighteen-year old Lowell Mitchell leaves her Friday morning history class and goes back to her room. Her roommate talks to her as she lies on the bed with her arm across her face. That is the last time she is seen, and 12 hours later the Bristol Police are involved. Read More. Eighteen-year old Lowell Mitchell leaves her Friday morning history class and goes back to her room. Her roommate talks to her as she lies on the bed with her arm across her face. That is the last time she is seen, and 12 hours later the Bristol Police are involved. Read Less. All Copies ( 48 ) Softcover ( 42 ) Hardcover ( 5 ) Choose Edition ( 5 ) Book Details Seller Sort. Brownstown, MI, USA. Edition: ImPress Mystery Hardcover, Very Good Details: Publisher: ImPress Mystery Alibris ID: 16679013891 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Very good. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. 2004, ImPress Mystery. Edition: 2004, ImPress Mystery Hardcover, Good Details: Publisher: ImPress Mystery Published: 2004 Alibris ID: 15892389695 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. ► Contact This Seller. 2021, Poisoned Pen Press. Format: EPUB eBook. 2021, Poisoned Pen Press. Edition: 2021, Poisoned Pen Press Trade paperback, Very Good Details: Pages: 240 Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Published: 1954 Alibris ID: 12864105638 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99 Trackable Expedited: $7.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Very good. Pocket Books 988 / nice tight copy / smaller paperback. vintage paperback. ► Contact This Seller. 2021, Poisoned Pen Press. Columbia, MD, USA. Edition: 2021, Poisoned Pen Press Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 3 Details: ISBN: 1464213054 ISBN-13: 9781464213052 Pages: 240 Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Published: 2021 Language: English Alibris ID: 16490377800 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 240 p. Library of Congress Crime Classics. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers. ► Contact This Seller. 2021, Poisoned Pen Press. Edition: 2021, Poisoned Pen Press Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 10+ Details: ISBN: 1464213054 ISBN-13: 9781464213052 Pages: 240 Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Published: 2021 Language: English Alibris ID: 16486120636 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99 Trackable Expedited: $7.99 Two Day Air: $14.99 One Day Air: $19.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 240 p. Library of Congress Crime Classics. ► Contact This Seller. 2021, Poisoned Pen Press. Grand Rapids, MI, USA. Edition: 2021, Poisoned Pen Press Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 5 Details: ISBN: 1464213054 ISBN-13: 9781464213052 Pages: 240 Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Published: 2/2/2021 Language: English Alibris ID: 16539662334 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New in New jacket. Last Seen Wearing (Paperback or Softback) ► Contact This Seller. 2021, Poisoned Pen Press. Edition: 2021, Poisoned Pen Press Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 5 Details: ISBN: 1464213054 ISBN-13: 9781464213052 Pages: 240 Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Published: 2021 Language: English Alibris ID: 16487651430 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: $3.99. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Hillary Waugh. Award-winning crime writer who pioneered the police procedural in his classic Last Seen Wearing. Hillary Waugh, the mystery writer who died on December 2 aged 88, was the author of nearly 50 novels, including Last Seen Wearing… (1952), acclaimed as a classic in the development of the American police procedural. His work – which introduced generations of readers to small-town intrigue and police techniques rooted in real investigations – earned him a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1989, ranking him with such figures as Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Mickey Spillane, Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie. Waugh was a workaday crime writer with three books to his credit when, in 1950, he chanced to pick up a volume of true crime cases. He was struck by its unsensational tone and attention to detail, and wondered if he could pull off the same effect in a novel. Although his debut police novel Last Seen Wearing… (published in Britain in 1953) was slow to catch on, it eventually attracted both popular and critical acclaim. The American writer Raymond Chandler praised it, as did the British critic Julian Symons. "If a single book had to be chosen to show the possibilities in the police novel which are outside crime fiction," Symons declared in his 1972 study of the genre, Bloody Murder, "no better example could be found…" Another British enthusiast was the crime writer and Daily Telegraph journalist HRF Keating. "He hits with deadly accuracy the note struck by a non-fiction writer, usually some sort of journalist, desperately concerned to convince readers that nothing in his pages is made up…" Keating included Last Seen Wearing… in his definitive Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987). It was listed by the Mystery Writers of America as one of the top 100 mystery novels of all time. Waugh admitted that realism in this sort of book was illusory, as almost all police work is actually dull routine. Frank Ford, his chief of police in Last Seen Wearing… never appeared again, but Waugh followed up with 11 novels featuring another small town police chief, Fred Fellows, and three about Frank Sessions, a detective in New York. His work also broke a major taboo in the genre of mystery fiction by broaching the subject of sex crime: murder and adultery in Sleep Long My Love (1959), murder and rape in The Young Prey (1969) and the murder of a prostitute in Finish Me Off (1970). Hillary Baldwin Waugh was born on June 22 1920 at New Haven, Connecticut, and in 1942 graduated from Yale University, where he later taught mystery writing. During the Second World War he served as a US Naval Air Corps airman. Unsure about a career – his interests ranged from boxing and badminton to songwriting and cartooning – he worked as a newspaper editor and a high school teacher before publishing his first novel, Madame Will Not Dine Tonight, in 1947. Two more undistinguished books followed, before Last Seen Wearing… began a lengthy string of mysteries in which the characters used real police techniques to solve mysteries. It was a clear departure from the Chandleresque approach in which a private detective, squirrelling away facts and relying on his or her wits and instinct, emerged with all the answers. "I was tired of reading about these super-detectives and a police force composed of a bunch of bumbling idiots," Waugh declared. "I wanted to get away from the neat little corpses with the perfect bullet through the head, and instead write a story as it really happened." As well as writing novels under his own name, he also used the pseudonym Elissa Grandower. Besides his fictional work, Waugh wrote Hillary Waugh's Guide to Mysteries and Mystery Writing (1990). He was elected a Grand Master by the Swedish Academy of Detection in 1981. Hillary Waugh's first marriage to Diana Taylor was dissolved in 1980; his second marriage, to Shannon Cork, ended in divorce in 1995. He had a son and two daughters by his first wife. Hillary Waugh. Although he did not invent the police-procedural novel, Hillary Waugh, who has died aged 88, defined this sub-genre of the detective story, in which the puzzle of the criminal's identity is sublimated to the unfolding police work. Waugh's 1952 novel Last Seen Wearing is generally considered the finest early example of the police procedural; the British critic Julian Symons included it in his list of the 100 greatest crime novels, on Raymond Chandler's recommendation. Waugh's genius lay in building suspense and maintaining pace while relying on none of the tropes of the classic detective novel: no red herrings, cliffhangers, or shoot-outs. He built suspense by concentrating on the details, once comparing his mystery stories to sonnets, saying "in a really good plot there is nothing extraneous". Waugh was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from Yale with a degree in art and music, he spent the second world war patrolling the Panama Canal Zone as a navy pilot. He began writing and, after the war, published his first novel, Madam Will Not Dine Tonight (1947), a country-house mystery solved by the private detective Sheridan Wesley, a guest at the dinner party whose hostess turns up dead. Two more novels followed, but Waugh had tired of bumbling police and erudite detectives. "I wanted to get away from the neat little corpses with the perfect bullet through the head and instead write a story as it really happened," he said in a 1990 interview. The times were right for a more factual approach. Lawrence Treat's V as in Victim (1945) is usually cited as the first police-procedural novel, but films such as Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) and Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948) melded European neo-realism to American hard-boiled crime, while Sidney Kingsley's Broadway hit Detective Story (1949, later filmed by William Wyler, starring Kirk Douglas) and the radio show Dragnet had helped to establish everyday police work as dramatic fodder. In 1950 MacKinlay Kantor wrote Signal Thirty-Two, about cops in New York City, but Last Seen Wearing adroitly blended such realism with the style of traditional detective novels and, crucially, was set in small-town New England, rather than the mean streets of New York or Los Angeles. Basing the book on the disappearance of a student from Vermont's Bennington College, Waugh reset the crime in fictional Bristol, Massachusetts, based on Northampton, where his fiancee, Diana Taylor, was a student at Smith, another exclusive women's college. Waugh's main character, the police chief Frank Ford, was the antithesis of the know-it-all detective: an ordinary man, a plodder in some ways, whose compassion draws the reader into the story. Waugh continued to produce detective novels, including one, The Case of the Missing Gardener (1954), under the pseudonym Harry Walker, but then recast Ford in a series of books featuring chief Fred Fellows, of Stockford, Connecticut, another fictional New England town based largely on the shoreline town of Guildford, outside New Haven. There Waugh lived most of his life in his parents' old summer cottage, edited a local paper in nearby Branford, and served a term as the town's first selectman, the equivalent of a mayor. One Fellows novel, Sleep Long, My Love (1959), was turned into the 1962 British film Jigsaw, starring Jack Warner, with the story moved to Brighton. A number of Waugh's stories were adapted for television in the early 1960s, and he wrote three novels as H Baldwin Taylor. He also spent time in New York City, producing two classic procedurals, the first of which, 30 Manhattan East (1968), was titled in homage to Kantor. Although writers such as Ed McBain drew more heavily on Treat's template, Waugh's influence is seen strongly in America in Lawrence Sanders's Edward X Delany novels, and in Britain with John Creasey's Gideon series, which began in 1955. Waugh wrote more than 50 novels, including five gothic romances, as Elissa Grandower, between 1976 and 1980. In 1989 the Mystery Writers of America gave him its grand master award. He and Taylor married in 1951, and divorced in 1981. In 1983 he married the novelist Shannon O'Cork. In 1989 O'Cork published How to Write Mysteries; the following year Waugh's seminal Guide to Mysteries and Mystery Writing appeared. He and O'Cork divorced in 1993. He is survived by a son and two daughters. Hillary Baldwin Waugh, crime novelist, born 22 June 1920; died 8 December 2008. Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh. academic and personal thoughts on detective-inspector novels. last seen wearing --- A student disappears from a tony New England women's college. Was she abducted? the victim of an abortionist? did she run away with a boyfriend? did a boyfriend murder her? Chief Ford and Sergeant Cameron of the local detective force run down every lead and bat around every theory till they learn the truth. Waugh, Hillary. Last Seen Wearing ---. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952. ___. On recherche … Translated by Edwidge Champoury. Genève: Ditis, 1953. ___. È scomparsa una ragazza. Translated by Lucia Pighi Maccia. Milano: Garzanti, 1954. ___. Eine perfekte Indizienkette. Translated by Ursula Klipstein. München: Desch, 1963. ___. Dødens dagbog. Translated by Annalise and Erik Pouplier. København: Lademann, 1970. Reprinted as Sidst set iført. København: Rosenkilde, 2010. this is the edition that I cite. Last Seen Wearing --- , a 1952 detective novel by Hillary Waugh, is sometimes seen as the first police procedural. It is later than Lawrence Treat's V as in Victim (1945) by several years, though, and in some respects marks an evolutionary node in the direction of the detective-inspector type of procedural. I don't include Treat on this site, though I mention him here and there, and perhaps I shouldn't include Waugh's novel, either. But the central dynamic in Last Seen Wearing --- is the byplay between Ford, the chief of police, and Cameron, his detective sergeant. Both are gruff, aging, verbally-abusive men locked in a longterm professional relationship. (Ford has been in the police department 33 years, Cameron 18.) Perhaps they have hearts of gold, but you wouldn't know it from the way they constantly snap at each other. Ford, the supervisor, has learned on the job; Cameron has a college education. Each uses the dynamic to assert an upper hand in argument over the other, but since they proceed from different assumptions about the value of book learning, neither can ever win. In Last Seen Wearing --- the detectives, part of the force in the invented "Bristol, Massachusetts," are faced with the disappearance of a young student from the nearby women's college. There isn't a trace of young Lowell Mitchell, usually given the epithet "pretty." Her grades are OK, her family happy enough, no interpersonal conflicts in the dorms. Ford and Cameron immediately guess that Mitchell is pregnant and that her disappearance is connected to her condition: she's run away with the father, she's run away to get an abortion, she's ended her life in panic – or the father has ended it for her. The past is truly a different country. Ford and Cameron make much of Lowell's "moral character," which to them consists of how far she'll go past modest necking. The double standard rules: all men are eager for sex at all times, and that's the natural order of things; whether sex is consummated is determined by the virtue of the women they pursue. "Your definition of a virgin is any girl over six who can run faster than her brother," Cameron tells Ford (129), and the raunchy one-liner epitomizes the sexual and moral universes of Waugh's novel. Dating, 65 years ago, was evidently a heady brew of attack and defense, of constant moral and practical calculation, of doublethink and compartmentalization. Men, at least of the college class represented by Lowell's dates, try to get what they can and women try to get a wedding ring before submitting. A girl who's given in is too loose for marriage but can be enjoyed liberally without. Meanwhile, lots of intercourse is taking place but can be erased by denial or, if needed, abortion. Lowell's diary mentions all kinds of boys and all kinds of strictly-controlled encounters (one even resulting in the significant "soul-kiss," but her lack of any commentary on anything stronger gives the initial impression that she's the rare principled virgin at her college. But Ford realizes that he will have to read between the lines of the diary and find the code (three exclamation points. ) that stands for intercourse. Lowell's body washes up in a river; she was pregnant; all that's left is to find the father/killer. We never actually meet the character who's killed her. The cops zero in on him using logic, crime-scene analysis, and egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment. Waugh ends the narrative when the cops are on the brink of success, a nice narrative move that apparently ties things up but leaves the resolution (and, as so often, the punishment) to the reader's imagination. The omniscient narration is fact-heavy, and matter-of-fact. Jack Webb's Dragnet had premiered on radio in 1949 (and then on TV in 1951), and Waugh's novel shows its influence, or that of other shows of its ilk. At one point, "the radio, turned down low, gave forth the growling tones of a mystery drama but Ford wasn't listening" (153). We get lots of exact times, dates and addresses, succinct summaries of detail (most of which proves irrelevant, of course). Nobody actually says "just the facts, ma'am," but it's not for lack of wanting to. Waugh doesn't seem to have turned Last Seen Wearing --- into a series or consistently to have worked its generic vein. If he didn't, he missed a bet: he could have developed a memorable blend of the detective-inspector novel and the blunt procedural, along the lines of Ed McBain. As it is, Last Seen Wearing --- seems to have been widely read and widely translated, and may well have influenced many followers in the genre. hand-coded in HTML all contents copyright © Tim Morris created 29 aug 2016 updated 16 jul 2017. Dead Yesterday. “What you people can’t get through your heads is that under normal conditions you wouldn’t pay attention to something like that, but normal conditions don’t exist on that campus. A girl disappeared from there, which means something is wrong about that campus. Therefore anything that goes on there the least bit different from the ordinary, I want to know about it. If a girl breathes different from usual, even, I want to know why.” When a student disappears from Parker College, an elite women’s school, it’s for one of three reasons: trouble at home, trouble at school, or a man. The missing girls always turn up in a day or two. Eighteen-year-old Marilyn “Lowell” Mitchell came from a happy family and earned good grades. She wasn’t very interested in dating. Yet on Sunday, March 10, she walked off the Parker campus and vanished into thin air. Last Seen Wearing is a landmark mystery novel, one of the earliest realistic police procedurals. And like many groundbreaking works, it’s been so influential that it may seem less than revolutionary to later readers. While Hillary Waugh was not the inventor of this subgenre, his work is edgier than previous procedural authors, and Last Seen Wearing very effectively sets the template for every gritty police drama to come. The disappearance of Lowell Mitchell brings the genteel, feminine world of a single-sex college into conflict with the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the police. The administrators of Parker College fence their students in with rules designed to keep them as innocent and childlike as possible. The girls must sign in and out of their dormitory. Lowell’s friends know that she intended to leave campus because she changed out of her jeans and into a skirt—Parker students are not allowed off campus in trousers. Police chief Frank Ford and Sergeant Cameron are unimpressed by these shows of virtue: “Now, don’t tell me you’re falling for that crap her family and friends are dishing out about how pure she is.” They know from their own experience that college girls are just as likely to get in trouble as anyone else. What they don’t know is the exact nature of the trouble Lowell found herself in. Was she the victim of a random crime? Did she elope? Run away from school or family pressure, or just want to start an independent life? Ford and Cameron keep returning to the possibility of pregnancy and, especially, abortion. C ameron stuck his hands on his hips. “What are you telling me that’s new? Sex is an angle any time any girl disappears.” Ford sat down again and threw away his cigarette. “I’m telling you it’s more than an angle in this case,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s foul play, or abortion, or running off with somebody, but it’s something to do with sex. I’ll lay odds on it. That girl is built for it. Sex might even be an ugly word to her but it’s going to haunt her just the same.” Beneath his cynical bluster, Ford really cares for the missing girl. (In a nice subversion of cliché, after his first day on the case, he comes home and gazes fondly upon his own teenage daughter. By the next day, he’s back to yelling at the kid again.) At one point, the team is chasing two separate leads, one that might have Lowell alive on land, and one that would have her dead in the harbor. Ford unleashes a furious, seemingly unmotivated, barrage of abuse upon Cameron, who understands completely. “Well, what do you know? The chief’s really bothered. The chief is really scared that is Lowell’s body the Harbor Police picked up.” Then the two men wait together for news. These hard-nosed cops bury their emotions with insults and gallows humor, but that doesn’t mean they are indifferent to victims and their families. The wealth and prominence of the Mitchell family bring a lot of distractions to the investigation. Lowell’s father Carl is always hanging around the station, along with his private detective, who is viewed as an unnecessary annoyance by the police even though he does produce some useful information. The biggest intrusion comes from the press. The small college town is swarmed by reporters, “like vultures waiting to be fed and there was no doubt as to what their hope was. They only wanted it to be realized before their deadlines.” Despite all this, Ford and Cameron remain focused on the day-to-day grind of police work, painstakingly interviewing witnesses and running down leads. These are the technical details that would have been so interesting when the book was first published but have lost their novelty over the decades. Some of the more unusual or retro aspects of the case are noteworthy, however. A lake is drained over the course of a long, tense day. A hapless officer is recruited to don a swimsuit and drag the freezing-cold river for an audience of appreciative college girls. Most impressively, Ford comes up with a clever way of determining whether a piece of evidence turned up in a certain location on its own or was placed there intentionally. “Hell, Burt, you know police routine. It’s leg work, leg work, leg work. It’s covering every angle. It’s sifting a ton of sand for a grain of gold. It’s talking to a hundred people and getting nowhere and then going out and talking to a hundred more.” The only real evidence they have is Lowell’s diary, and Ford is determined to investigate every man mentioned in its pages, however fleetingly. The journal is cleverly written by Waugh. At first it appears to be nothing more than an innocuous record of daily life. Lowell’s friends are getting engaged, but at times she herself seems painfully young, fretting about homework and delighting over Ichabod and Mr. Toad (“Disney is wonderful!”) Each time Ford returns to the diary, however, it reveals ominous new shades, signs that Lowell’s real life was lived between the lines. Last Seen Wearing paints a dark picture of the Eisenhower era. It’s not only a cornerstone of the genre, it’s also a suspenseful mystery in its own right. As the hours and days tick away, chapter by chapter, the search for Lowell grows increasingly urgent. Though some of the police procedures may have become familiar tropes, the investigation moves forward with a fresh and profane energy that never flags. Second Opinions. This is one of those books that shows up on a lot of “Best of ” lists and is highly regarded as a landmark novel in the history of the genre. Though writers like Helen Reilly in the US and Nigel Morland in the UK had been writing excellent examples of the police procedural during the 1930s and 1940s apparently it was Hilary Waugh who had readers and critics alike take notice of a new kind of detective novel that would appeal to modern readers. Last Seen Wearing… is indeed one of the best examples and while there isn’t as much interesting detail about the relationships between the cops nor the dull bureaucracy that are both hallmarks of Jonathan Craig’s 6th Precinct series Waugh still shows that police can be just as clever and insightful as the brilliant amateurs who dominated the genre in the pre-World War 2 era of the Golden Age. This is a highly recommended book for serious fans of the genre. And I think many seasoned writers being published today might learn a thing or two by studying this lean and trenchant book. Last Seen Wearing… is generally described as one of the earliest police procedurals, and it is impressive on that score. Availability. Last Seen Wearing is out of print, with used copies widely available.