Skip to main content

Top mysteries challenge review: Last Seen Wearing by Hillary Waugh

Year of publication: 1952
Genre: Mystery, police procedural
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Massachusetts, USA; March-April 1950

Story:
18 year-old Marilyn Lowell Mitchell disappears without trace from her college dormitory and goes missing for 2 weeks before she is found dead. It is only because of some clever comparative forensic work by the town's police chief that her death is ruled a murder and not a suicide. It is then up to the police to dig for clues as to the who and why of her death.

Review:
This is a pure police procedural and a very realistic one. The entire investigation is based on solid and diligent searching for clues and evidence and the elimination of suspects. It has the requisite false leads and dead ends, but no real red herrings, because those false leads are quickly revealed as such, instead of dominating the plot for several chapters like they might in a less realistic story.
But this is far from being a mere dry recounting of an investigation, because Waugh knew how to create interesting characters. It is especially Chief Ford and Detective Cameron that come alive, but every character comes across as realistic without too much description. It is in the combination of these factors with humour, pathos and a matter-of-fact storytelling that makes this a great story.

Rating: An excellent and near-perfect police procedural. 4+ stars.

Books left in challenge: 114

For those who have read the book or those who haven't and don't mind spoilers, Wikipedia has a good summary of the plot.

Comments

RuthDFW said…
How intersting it must be to read a police story from the 50s. Do you find yourself missing the tech abilties we have today. Also of course it is such a different world and today we think we know so much about how crimes are solved.
Bibliophile said…
Ruth, the forensic techniques used in the story are not fundamentally different from modern methods. The biggest difference is that there was no DNA analysis available at the time of writing, which would have assisted in solving part of the mystery, but hair and fibre analysis is used in the story, and the body of the murder victim is identified using dental records.
If you like reading forensic detective stories I recommend the Dr. Thorndyke short stories by R. Austin Freeman. You'll be amazed at what what forensic methods were available at the time (the earliest story dates back to 1907).

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme