HILLARY WAUGH: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Hillary Waugh, who died on 8 December (though his death wasn't made public until the end of the month) appears in today's Guardian; you can find it here. Waugh was one of the masters of the police procedural novel, and Last Seen Wearing is considered a milestone. It was particularly interesting to analyse his approach to the sub-genre, to which he came via 'cozy' mysteries. And it was a special pleasure for me to write about him, as he was born and lived most of his life in New Haven and Guilford, Connecticut, the area where I was raised. Apparently, he kept a very comprehensive daily journal fom ages 17 to 80, and they lined rows of bookshelves in his house in Guilford, which had been his family's summer cottage when he was a boy in New Haven. Like Guilford, Woodmont, when I was growing up, still had cottages used in the summer by people from New Haven, only ten miles away; with my birthday approching, it struck me how diametrically different my life would be had I been able to buy and live in one of them...