Last Seen Wearing

I wanted to read Last Seen Wearing, by Hilary Waugh, because it was recommended in All The Beautiful Lies, as one of bookseller Bill’s most recommended campus crime novels, along with The Secret History.  Because I got this from the library, in one of those old-fashioned school bindings with no cover art and no book blurb, I had basically no idea what to expect going in, besides a highly-recommended campus mystery.

Last Seen Wearing was written in the fifties, and set at a women’s college in Massachusetts, a fictionalized Smith or Mount Holyoke, in the old days when that meant curfews and pearls. Freshman Marilyn Lowell Mitchell disappears after morning classes one day. Her hallmates swing by the infirmary later, to check on her, but she’s not there, and she hasn’t signed out for the weekend or packed a bag. She’s just vanished. The story is intriguing right from the start, with early scenes almost begging for a re-read to see if there’s an important clue in the descriptions.

A lot of the investigation relies on a pretty garbage view of women as either Good Girls Who Don’t (and who won’t until they get the ring) or Worthless Bad Girls. In general, the college girls as seen as good girls, blamelessly playing bridge or off to well-chaperoned weekends at Yale and Harvard.  When a woman is suspected of sexual activity, though, she’s not worth much, sometimes she’s an extra-dumb slut who can’t possibly be foolish enough expect marriage (obviously everyone’s goal) from a man after they’ve slept with him.  Why buy the cow, or whatever.

I just loved these pulpy, sensationalized covers, because that’s exactly the story:  the disappearance of a sexy co-ed, with hints of scary foul play, sexy secrets or both.  For a large part of the story, the police assume she’s run off for an abortion, because in this world, abortion or elopement are the obvious (maybe the only?) reasons a young woman might disappear. (When the police were researching the abortion theory, I really hoped this wasn’t the case, because it seemed like a smart girl could tell a little story about visiting a friend for a long weekend, sign out properly, and come back to school after her procedure. There are such heavy, cosntant expectations that young girls are emotional and foolish, I really didn’t want that to be the case.)

Last Seen Wearing is a solid police procedural, with the clever investigation troubled by red herrings from well-meaning citizens and cranks both. I loved the careful investigation, but I didn’t love the hard-boiled detectives themselves, mostly because their banter, often while being served cocktails by a wife who doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, relies so heavily on this good girl/bad girl world view. The female characters don’t really get internal lives, even the diary entries that serve as clues to the mystery feel slightly flat, with observations about handsome boys and homework assignments, and this is one place that we could really use lively, internal thoughts (Then again, the diary turns out to have been written with careful concern for others reading it, so maybe it’s intentional). None of the female relationships are really described, in contrast to the bantered, layered relationship between the police officers.

Overall, it’s a solid mystery to try to solve, with plenty of surprises and suspense, but this book also accidentally reveals a second theme, all about sensationalizing young girls’ sexuality and morality, while entirely ignoring the girls’ thoughts and feelings.