Last Seen Wearing ... (Hillary Waugh novel)
First edition
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| Author | Hillary Waugh |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Mystery |
| Publisher | Doubleday Crime Club |
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Publication date
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1952 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 191 pp |
Last Seen Wearing ... (1952) is a U.S. detective novel by Hillary Waugh frequently referred to as the police procedural par excellence. Set in a fictional college town in Massachusetts, the book is about a female freshman who goes missing and the painstaking investigation carried out by the police with the aim of finding out what has happened to her and, if necessary, tracking down any perpetrator who has done her harm.
"The police examine her past for any motive that might make her wish to disappear, or any reason why someone might want to kill her. They find her body after a long and frustrating search. As they sift all the evidence again and again, the identity of her killer slowly begins to emerge, like a photograph taking on recognizable features in the developing fluid" (Ian Ousby).
The novel, which minutely chronicles the work of the police, is told exclusively in chronological order. No piece of information is ever held back. At any given point in time, the reader knows just as much as the police — neither more nor less. The time narrated is 5½ weeks, from 3 March 1950 to 11 April 1950.
(1) In broad daylight, at lunchtime on a cold winter's day, 18-year-old Marilyn Lowell Mitchell disappears from the campus of the all-female Parker College situated in the small town of Bristol, Massachusetts, 66 miles from Boston. She has left all her things in her room, and her diary is found. Her parents are informed, and eventually, on the following day, the police are called in.
(2) Right from the start of the investigation, Bristol police chief Frank W. Ford's principal is "Cherchez le boy". In other words, the police think Lowell might be pregnant, with or without her trying to contact a doctor willing to perform an abortion (illegal in 1950), or that she has just run off with some man. Both her fellow students and her parents declare all these speculations impossibilities and claim that Lowell is not that sort of girl; that she has had dates, but with no-one in particular; that she has never gone any further than "necking" and "soul-kissing"; and that she is definitely still a virgin. Her diary gives the police no clue whatsoever to prove the opposite.
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Wikipedia