Mystery author Hillary Waugh has died. He was 88. Waugh's books focused on police procedure and the intrigues of small town life.
Waugh died Dec. 8 in a nursing facility in Torrington after a brief illness, his son Lawrence said Saturday.
Waugh's dozens of novels — numbering almost 50, including some he wrote under pen names — earned him a Grand Master Award in 1989 from the Mystery Writers of America.
The honor places him in the company of such writers as Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Mickey Spillane, Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie.
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His first novel, Madame Will Not Dine Tonight, was published in 1947 and began a long string of mysteries in which the characters used real police techniques to solve mysteries.
That was a clear departure from the genre in which a private detective, squirreling away facts and relying on his or her wits and instinct, emerged with all the answers.
"I was tired of reading about these super-detectives and a police force composed of a bunch of bumbling idiots," Waugh told The New York Times in 1990.
"I wanted to get away from the neat little corpses with the perfect bullet through the head, and instead write a story as it really happened."
