LAST SEEN WEARING

Waugh’s pioneering 1952 police procedural has gathered nary a speck of dust over the last 69 years.

First-year student Marilyn Lowell Mitchell, 18, stays after class to confer with her history teacher, skips lunch with her roommate because she’s not feeling well, and then vanishes from the campus of Massachusetts’s fictitious Parker College. Her housemother assumes she’s gone off with a boy; when the police fail to find any trace of her, suspicions deepen that she’s sneaked off to have an abortion. The reward her father offers—“$5,000 IF FOUND ALIVE. $2,500 IF FOUND DEAD”—fails to turn up any new leads, and the Philadelphia private detective he hires adds nothing substantial. So it’s up to the local law to find Lowell. Bristol Police Chief Frank W. Ford and DS Burton K. Cameron track down every man she’s dated and drain a local lake without success. When Lowell’s body is eventually discovered, DA Dave McNarry uses veiled references from her diary entries to make a case for suicide, but Ford tries a daring experiment that convinces the judge it’s murder. What’s most remarkable about Waugh’s expert handling of a formula that’s since become commonplace is its severe economy. As Leslie S. Klinger’s Introduction points out, Waugh’s not interested in racial, class, or economic conflicts; everyone in Bristol seems cut from the same cloth. It goes further: The suspects are never more than suspects; the detectives have no private lives to speak of; and when Ford quarrels with Cameron or McNarry, it’s always about the case, which proceeds methodically to a solution as satisfying as it is unsurprising.

Despite its predecessors, Waugh’s indispensable novel remains the true progenitor of the modern procedural.