Crime Portal

Last Seen Wearing (1952) by Hillary Waugh is hailed by genre scholars as the first acclaimed “police procedural” novel, a pioneering work of crime fiction that shifted the focus from the lone single detective to investigative team members and their process. Paving the way for modern police procedural novels – not to mention television phenomena such as Law and Order, CSI, Criminal Minds, and other series – is distinction enough, but Last Seen Wearing is also of literary interest for other reasons. The novel uses a real-life true crime case as a springboard for its fictional investigation, and, in its exploration of a missing student at an elite women’s college, it also builds on the tradition of the campus mystery, employs ingredients of the New England Gothic, and anticipates the rise of dark academia.

In this module we will consider how Last Seen Wearing serves as both a pioneering novel and a window into its moment in time. What does Last Seen Wearing tell us about the intersection of fiction and true crime? Gender and the Gothic? What has “aged well” in the story and what hasn’t, and what does this tell us about the evolution of mystery-related storytelling? And what can we learn about the blending and blurring of genres from this fictional solution to a real-life cold case?

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Lecture 1: Crime Fiction and Its Evolution
	Discussion 1: Part 1 of Last Seen Wearing
Week 2	Lecture 2: True Crime, Campus Mystery, and the Imagination
	Discussion 2: Part 2 of Last Seen Wearing
Week 3	Lecture 3: The Police and the Process
	Discussion 3: Part 3 of Last Seen Wearing
Week 4	Lecture 4: The Meaning and Legacy of Last Seen Wearing
	Discussion 4: Themes and Takeaways