While I enjoyed Hillary Waugh’s police procedural, Last Seen Wearing, I appreciated the introduction to the book even more.

Leslie S. Klinger wrote the introduction and notes to this latest addition to the Library of Congress Crime Classics series. Klinger says this book was the first “acclaimed police procedural”, released in 1952. Waugh is said to have written it after reading a collection of true crime cases. He also said he was inspired by the radio show “Dragnet”. Last Seen Wearing went on to appear on Mystery Writers of America’s list of The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time.

Klinger surmises that Waugh based this novel on the Dec. 1, 1946 disappearance of a Bennington College student, eighteen-year-old Paula Jean Weldon. The case was never solved, unlike the disappearance in Last Seen Wearing. In fact, the police in the Weldon case were so widely criticized that it led to the formation of the Vermont statewide police force. Waugh’s mystery is a step-by-step, methodical police procedural that follows the entire case of a college student’s disappearance. According to Klinger, it also reflects the white middle-class values of the period in which it was written.

On Friday, March 3, 1950, Marilyn Lowell Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old freshman disappears from her dorm at Parker College while her roommate is at lunch. No one thinks much of it until Lowell is still missing at curfew, midnight, and she hasn’t signed out. Staff in the dorms are worried enough to call campus police and to search the campus, but they don’t call Bristol, Massachusetts police until the next morning. Police Chief Frank W. Ford is furious that he’s only finding out about the disappearance in the morning, but he puts two men on the investigation. As reporters flood into town, though, and Lowell hasn’t shown up, Ford soon has the entire department working on the case of the missing young woman.

Ford suspects sex is involved, and that Lowell was pregnant, and disappeared to have an abortion. But, the other students are positive that there was no young man who meant anything to Lowell. She dated frequently, but her diary entries don’t show any attachment to one particular young man. However, Ford’s force digs in to investigate and question men from Massachusetts to Ohio, men mentioned in the diary.

The case lasts for two weeks, and it’s leg work, the dogged following of every clue and questioning of every suspect involved with Lowell that finally cracks the case. This early police procedural shows the police force as hard-working men who are relentless in the search for answers.

As Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress says, and as Klinger reiterates in his introduction, Last Seen Wearing is a period piece. It reflects one time period and one setting, a white all-girls college where women were going to get their MRS. degree more than any other. The police reaction to the case is a reaction to the community and its past history. Students of the mystery genre may want to try this early police procedural from the MWA list.

Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh. Sourcebooks/Poisoned Pen Press, 2021. ISBN 9781464213052 (paperback), 240p.

FTC Full Disclosure – I received a .PDF to review for a journal.