Last Seen Wearing

By Hillary Waugh

No one saw her leave, and no one knows where she went...

It's a perfectly typical day for Lowell Mitchell at her perfectly ordinary university in Massachusetts. She goes to class, chats with friends, and retires to her dorm room. Everything is normal until suddenly it's not—in the blink of an eye, Lowell is gone.

Facts are everything for Police Chief Frank Ford. He's a small-town cop, and he knows only hard evidence and thorough procedure will lead him to the truth. Together with the wise-cracking officer Burt Cameron, the grizzled chief will deal with the distraught family, chase dead-end leads, interrogate shady witnesses, and spend late nights ruminating over black coffee and cigars. Everyone tells him what a good, responsible girl Lowell is. But Ford believes that Lowell had a secret and that if he can discover it, this case will crack wide open.

Considered one of the first-ever police procedurals and hailed as an American mystery milestone, Last Seen Wearing—based on a true story—builds suspense through its accurate portrayal of an official police investigation. Hillary Waugh, who earned the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America, went on to create several memorable series, but this classic crime novel ranks among his finest work.

This next installment in the Library of Congress Crime Classics series will keep readers in suspense until the final page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781464213069

Book preview

Copyright © 1952 by Hillary Waugh

Introduction and notes © 2021 by Leslie S. Klinger

Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks and Library of Congress

Cover design by Heather VenHuizen/Sourcebooks

Cover images © The Library of Congress

Cover image: Keep mum chum. William B. Finley for the Missouri WPA Art Project, 1943. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-825.

Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the Library of Congress

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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This edition of Last Seen Wearing is based on the first edition in the Library of Congress’s collection, originally published in 1952 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Waugh, Hillary, author. | Klinger, Leslie S., editor.

Title: Last seen wearing / Hillary Waugh ; edited, with an introduction and

notes, by Leslie S. Klinger.

Description: Naperville, Illinois : Library of Congress/Poisoned Pen Press,

[2021] | Series: Library of congress crime classics | "This edition of

Last Seen Wearing is based on the first edition in the Library of

Congress’s collection, originally published in 1952 by Doubleday &

Company, Inc" | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020031810 (trade paperback) | (epub)

Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3573.A9 L3 2021 (print) |

DDC 813/.54--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031810

To Diana—

With a Nod to Ruth, Cornie, Nora, Joan, and Carter

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Introduction

Last Seen Wearing

Reading Group Guide

Further Reading

About the Author

Back Cover

Foreword

Crime writing as we know it first appeared in 1841, with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Written by American author Edgar Allan Poe, the short story introduced C. Auguste Dupin, the world’s first wholly fictional detective. Other American and British authors had begun working in the genre by the 1860s, and by the 1920s we had officially entered the golden age of detective fiction.

Throughout this short history, many authors who paved the way have been lost or forgotten. Library of Congress Crime Classics bring back into print some of the finest American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s, showcasing rare and lesser known titles that represent a range of genres, from cozies to police procedurals. With cover designs inspired by images from the Library’s collections, each book in this series includes the original text, reproduced faithfully from an early edition in the Library’s collections and complete with strange spellings and unorthodox punctuation. Also included are a contextual introduction, a brief biography of the author, notes, recommendations for further reading, and suggested discussion questions. Our hope is for these books to start conversations, inspire further research, and bring obscure works to a new generation of readers.

Early American crime fiction is not only entertaining to read, but it also sheds light on the culture of its time. While many of the titles in this series include outmoded language and stereotypes now considered offensive, these books give readers the opportunity to reflect on how our society’s perceptions of race, gender, ethnicity, and social standing have evolved over more than a century.

More dark secrets and bloody deeds lurk in the massive collections of the Library of Congress. I encourage you to explore these works for yourself, here in Washington, DC, or online at www.loc.gov.

Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress

Introduction

Last Seen Wearing, the first acclaimed police procedural, veered sharply from earlier crime fiction, most of which revolved around a fascinating central character. Eugène-François Vidocq’s popular memoirs recounted a partly fictional account of his journey from colorful thief to thief-taker and founder of the Surete. Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq was a brilliant policeman. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and, later, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes were eccentric consulting detectives, working privately. By the mid-twentieth century, the central figure in crime writing was usually the hard-boiled detective, notable for his tenacity more than his intelligence. For more than a century, then, crime fiction came in basically two types: stories of a highly intelligent detective solving difficult puzzles or tales of bull-headed individuals slashing their way through Gordian knots of problems, often with their fists instead of their intellects. In 1945, Lawrence Treat invented a wholly new kind of crime novel. Treat’s V as in Victim delineated a crime solved by the police, using actual police methods. His detectives worked in teams, using realistically slow, patient methods of investigation—interviewing witnesses and suspects, sifting evidence in the police laboratory, and checking with confidential informants.¹

Four years later, Hillary Waugh, who had been writing standard detective novels, read a collection of true-crime writing about eleven cases of murders of young women and decided to write about a real case. He probably chose the December 1, 1946, disappearance of a Bennington College (Vermont) student, eighteen-year-old Paula Jean Welden. Welden’s disappearance was never solved, leaving Waugh free rein to craft a story. Influenced by the success of the radio program Dragnet,² he decided to follow Treat’s lead in focusing on the police investigation.³

The great innovation of Treat, Waugh, and those who followed in their footsteps was the humanization of the investigator. Gone was the eccentric, highly individualistic investigator. In his (or her) place were police officers shown as real people, with shabby offices, petty office politics, an attitude of us vs. them, and a disdain for paperwork. In the new police procedurals, the investigator is not free from constraints or working outside the normal procedures; investigation is usually done by a team, strictly bound by rules and regulations. There is no hero in a police procedural; rather, there are simply cops doing their jobs. The emphasis is both on how the cop works the case—with all of the technical details—and how the case works the cop.⁴ This approach is now widespread in film and television, including Police Story, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, CSI and its offspring, the extended Law and Order family, The Wire, and Bosch.

Focusing on the official police investigation didn’t require a fundamental change to crime writing. Although others further developed the police procedural—including Elizabeth Linnington (writing under her own name and as Lesley Egan and Dell Shannon—see Case Pending in this series) and Evan Hunter (writing forty-seven 87th Precinct novels as Ed McBain)—often these police procedurals depended on the classical form, the slow reveal of clues with a surprising conclusion (a technique also used by Treat). Waugh rejected that approach in Last Seen Wearing. It is a single well-constructed story line, with nothing extraneous. There are no cliffhangers, no red herrings, no sensational developments, no shoot-outs, no gadgets.

That is not to say that there is no mystery in Last Seen Wearing. There is a profusion of questions to be answered: Is the girl alive or dead? Did she voluntarily disappear or was she abducted? Is there a villain? And of course there are surprises—just as there are in reality. The vital plot elements are not presented as clues, however, but as natural developments of painstaking investigation by the police. Theories and evidence are examined and re-examined. For example, the college campus and the nearby lake and river are searched repeatedly. The victim’s diary is studied carefully four separate times, with each re-examination heightening the suspense. The last portion of the book shares the format of the inverted mystery story invented by R. Austin Freeman and popularized by the Columbo television series,⁵ in which the reader learns most of the secrets long before the ending, but there remains great pleasure in watching the noose being tightened around the wrongdoer’s neck.

Tellingly, neither Chief Ford, the lead investigator, nor his deputies, are eccentric or brilliant. They are depicted as real people, with home lives and prejudices and bad habits, who, through hard work, manage to solve the crime. There is a private detective involved in the case, but he is almost a parody, with a fixation on a theory that proves worthless. In fact, Last Seen Wearing is so far from the traditional mystery that we never even meet the villain. Rather, the field of potential suspects is winnowed, bit by bit, until only one remains. Nor is there a grand confrontation with the culprit, whose arrest and trial does not take place until after the story concludes.

In the hands of a master like Waugh, the tale grips us from the first page to discover what happened to Lowell Mitchell. Perhaps one of the great appeals of the book is the sense that the readers could have made that discovery for themselves. The great British author-critic Julian Symons wrote, "If a single book had to be chosen to show the possibilities in the police novel which are outside most crime fiction, no better example could be found than Last Seen Wearing."⁶ According to Waugh, it was Raymond Chandler who suggested that Symons include Last Seen Wearing in his list of the hundred greatest crime novels of all time.⁷

Like all great crime fiction, the book has merits well beyond the mystery itself. Set at a small college in the East, it is a thoughtful depiction of the insular nature of the academic world. It also evokes the attitudes of postwar America, or at least the hopes and dreams of White middle-class Americans. The book makes no comment on racial or religious issues, ethnic or class warfare, or even dissatisfaction with the life of the middle class. No one suggests that the missing girl may be the victim of random violence. The police instead leap to the conclusion that the missing girl has gotten herself in trouble with a boy and has run off to get an abortion and will return after her problem has been taken care of. Lowell Mitchell has been sent to a private girls’ college to obtain her MRS degree, as it was known—not to pursue an education or a career, and her parents disbelieve that their daughter could have conducted herself in the way the police suggest.

In these respects, Waugh’s novel accurately reflects the morality of the day—an America mostly very satisfied with itself, with an expectation of order and rational explanations for everything. While World War II was only a few years earlier, the book does not examine any repercussions of the war. The years when women were vital to the American workforce have been forgotten. There are no people of color in this book, no one with a foreign-sounding name, no identification of anyone as Jewish or Catholic—the small town is idyllic in its near isolation, with only a few occasional troublemakers, like traveling salesmen and a shady doctor or two. This is America the way that many imagined it—White, clean, untroubled.

This is not a book about Big Issues; rather, it is an argument that law enforcement is a vital and effective part of our civilization, best carried out by people who follow the rules. This is in stark contrast with the views of the hard-boiled detective writers of the 1930s and 1940s, who often focused on indefatigable investigators succeeding where thoroughly corrupt or inept police failed. Of course, while Waugh’s novel and many of the police procedurals that followed in its wake were closer to reality, they ignored some unpleasant truths. People in the world of 1950s crime fiction were not arrested for having the wrong skin color. The police didn’t brutalize those that they were supposed to protect, nor did they blindly manufacture convictions of the innocent. Exposure of those truths would have to wait for a later generation of writers. Until then, readers would enjoy the fiction that the police, as depicted by Last Seen Wearing and other books like it, were invariably the good guys.

—Leslie S. Klinger

¹ In his handbook for mystery writers, Treat made it clear that he thought knowledge of police work was essential to the crime fiction writer. Not only did he urge them to build a library of texts on criminal investigation and police science, but he also suggested that they meet actual police officers, to absorb the details of procedure and language. See Lawrence Treat, ed., Mystery Writer’s Handbook (New York: Mystery Writers of America, 1977).

² Hillary Waugh, Hilary Waugh’s Guide to Mysteries and Mystery Writing (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1991), 117–18.

³ Waugh never stated expressly that the Welden case was the basis of his book, but the similarities are uncanny. Ironically, the Welden police investigation was widely criticized, and the failure of the officials to solve the mystery led to the formation of a Vermont statewide police force.

⁴ A phrase attributed to Joseph Wambaugh—author of more than a dozen police novels as well as nonfiction about police officers—by Michael Connelly in his introduction to the anthology The Blue Religion (New York: Mystery Writers of America, 2008). Connelly is himself a leading exponent of the police procedural in his Harry Bosch series, including twenty-two novels and numerous short stories.

⁵ R. Austin Freeman’s story The Case of Oskar Brodski, published in his 1912 collection The Singing Bone, is said to be the first inverted mystery story. Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators of Columbo, popularized the form in the television series that ran sporadically from 1968 to 2003 and starred Peter Falk as the eponymous LAPD homicide detective. Critics termed Columbo a howcatchem as contrasted with a whodunit.

⁶ Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 207.

⁷ Interview: Hillary Waugh, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1977, 97.

Last Seen Wearing

FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 1950

⁸

Marilyn Lowell Mitchell, pretty eighteen-year-old freshman at Parker College in Bristol, Massachusetts,⁹ attended her noon history class on Friday, March 3, 1950. At its conclusion she went to the desk to speak to the teacher, Harlan P. Seward. She left the building a few moments later and walked back to her room in Lambert Annex, unaccompanied as far as can be determined.

When her roommate, Peggy Woodling, came up to discard her books, Lowell was lying on her bed. She was wearing the usual blue jeans, white shirt, sneakers, and ankle socks and was flat on her back with an arm across her face. When the chime sounded she made no move to get up. She was not going to lunch, she said. She felt sick, nothing serious, but she wasn’t hungry and wanted to rest awhile.

Unable to help her, Peggy went down to the usual Friday lunch of fried fish, boiled potatoes, and cole slaw, ate hurriedly, had a cigarette in the lounge, and read her mail. When she went back for her books Lowell was gone.

This somewhat surprised her but it was not until she came back from her zoology lecture and found the room still empty that she began to wonder. When Lowell did not show up for dinner she was frankly puzzled.

Lambert Annex was one of three Victorian houses that comprised the group known as Lambert Dorm. The other two, Lambert A and Lambert B, were good-sized dwellings housing around twenty-five girls apiece. Ann, as the Annex was called, being smaller, contained six girls, all freshmen, Virginia Grenfell, the faculty resident, and, because the dining hall was in Ann, two cooks and one maid.

Peggy ate with Hilda Gunther and Marlene Beecher, two of the other Ann residents, and they decided that Lowell must have gone to the infirmary. Mitch could be dying and she wouldn’t let on, said Marlene.

However, when the three took apples and cookies to the infirmary after dinner they discovered to their real surprise that Lowell was not there and now, for the first time, concern crept into their speculations. They went up to Lowell’s room and were somewhat relieved, for Hilda looked in the closet and there were Lowell’s things, jeans, shirt, and socks crammed in the top of her laundry bag and her sneakers on the floor. That meant she had changed her clothes, which meant she had got into a skirt and, since girls weren’t allowed to leave the campus in jeans, it meant she was going someplace and knew where she was going and didn’t expect to be coming back right away. Then they went down and checked the sign-out sheet on which the girls were supposed to note their intention of staying out after ten-thirty up till the midnight curfew. Her name wasn’t on it but that didn’t mean much at Ann because Ann was small and informal and Miss Grenfell was young and friendly and Mrs. Sherwood, the housemother, who lived in A, seldom came around. More times than not, the girls signed the sheet when they came back in and frequently they neglected to do it at all.

Marlene and Peggy were double-dating that night with a couple of boys from Carlton College, which was six miles north of Bristol on Route 19.¹⁰ The boys picked them up in a 1936 Buick¹¹ about eight o’clock and took them out to the Log Cabin, a plaster and concrete roadhouse halfway between the two colleges where they had an orchestra and soft lights and fancy decorations and where the waiters didn’t toss the How old are you? question at the college crowd when they ordered drinks. Patty Short and Sally Anders, the other two girls in Ann, were off at prom week ends at Yale and Princeton¹² so Hilda, left alone, went over to A and played bridge until ten-thirty. Then she came back to Ann to take over the watch and did homework in the lounge.

At five minutes of twelve there was laughing and talking on the porch outside. At one minute of, Hilda got up and switched the porch light off and on twice and went back to her work. In another moment Peggy and Marlene came in and locked the door. Hilda chucked her books, got up, and said, Hi, kids, how was it?

Peggy made a face and said, What a jumping jack.¹³ She took off her coat. Mitch back yet?

Hilda had completely forgotten. Good God, no! I don’t think so.

The three girls looked at each other, then ran up the stairs and down the long hall to the large room in back that Peggy and Lowell shared. The room was silent and dark and they knew before they threw on the lights that it was still empty.

She’ll have to report herself to J.B., said Marlene, appalled.

Maybe we ought to call the hospitals, said Peggy.

That wouldn’t work, said Hilda. They’d have called us if she were there.

We’ve got to do something!

Hilda’s mouth tightened. She turned and went back through the hall and down the stairs, the girls following. She went onto the porch, opened the storm door, and looked out. The concrete walk curved emptily out between the hedge to Maple Street. Around it, the crusty granular snow stuck like a thin raw waffle to the ground.¹⁴ Taylor House next door was dark and so was the Bristol Inn across the street. The light of the street lamp winked through the branches of the big oak in the lawn and sparkled on the snow. A cab went by fast and, overhead, the stars looked cold.

Hilda breathed vapor clouds into the frigid air for half a minute, looking up and down the silent street. Then she came in and relocked the front door. She was shivering. I’m going to tell Miss Grenfell, she said, and the others nodded agreement.

Miss Grenfell responded sleepily to the second knock on her cream-colored door. What is it?

Hilda put her cheek to the panel. Miss Grenfell, Lowell Mitchell hasn’t come in yet and nobody’s seen her since noon.

What time is it?

Quarter past twelve.

Old bedsprings creaked, a slot of light appeared in the gap under the door, clothing rustled, and a key turned. A pretty, twenty-six-year-old brunette stood in the doorway tying the sash of a rose dressing gown and blinking the sleep from her green eyes. Lowell’s missing, you say? What happened?

Peggy told her. Lowell was sick, she had gone away during lunch, she had not come back. I don’t know how sick she was, she concluded. Mitch doesn’t let on very much how she feels about things.

Maybe she went home. Did she fill out a blue card?

Blue cards! Of course.

Blue cards were Parker’s check on the whereabouts of students. They were filled out in the housemother’s presence by girls taking overnights and contained such information as where they were going, where they were staying, and when they would be back. It was something that hadn’t occurred to the girls since Lowell had said nothing about going away. Spur of the moment, said Hilda. She could have just made the one-thirty train.

That must be it, nodded Miss Grenfell.

I suppose, Hilda said tentatively, we ought to find out—just to make sure.

Miss Grenfell compressed her lips. I don’t like to wake up Mrs. Sherwood. Probably Lowell wasn’t feeling well and went home for the week end.

Mitch wouldn’t leave without filling out a blue card, affirmed Peggy.

I know she wouldn’t. Miss Grenfell paused. "I suppose we should check, though."

We’d better, decided Hilda.

Miss Grenfell nodded. Wait a couple of minutes, she said and closed the door to dress.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4

But Lowell had not filled out a blue card. Mrs. Sherwood said so quite definitely when the four girls roused her from sleep and brought her to the door. She stood there, tall, gray, and big-boned under a sagging plumpness

Reviews for Last Seen Wearing

[brone_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hard boiled detective story written in the fifties, this one pushed some buttons im sure

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very well done police procedural about the search for a college freshman who goes missing. Coincidentally it is set during March in a fictional town in Massachusetts (which I suspect is Holyoke).I really liked the diary-like way of writing this -- it helped build the tension as time passed with Lowell Mitchell still missing.