Lawrence Treat

• Born: December 21, 1903
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 7, 1998
• Place of death: Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts

Types of Plot: Private investigator; police procedural

Principal Series: Carl Wayward, 1940-1943; Mitch Taylor, Jub Freeman, and Bill Decker, 1945-1960

Contribution

Lawrence Treat is generally regarded as the father of the police procedural, that subgenre of detective fiction that emphasizes the realistic solution of mysteries through routine police methods, including dogged interrogations, stakeouts, tailings, and utilization of the technology of the police laboratory. Treat established some of the conventions of the police procedural that have appeared almost unfailingly in novels in this category ever since. Among them is the convention of the cop who is unable to maintain a normal family life because his work requires irregular hours and alienates him from everyone except other cops. Another convention is the theme of rivalry and tension within the law enforcement agency, caused by many different personalities trying to win glory and avoid blame. Finally, there is the convention of the police officer being a hated outsider, lied to, ridiculed, maligned, and occasionally made the target of attempted seduction. These conventions have become familiar not only in police procedural novels but also in motion pictures about police officers and in many popular television series.

Biography

Lawrence Treat was born Lawrence Arthur Goldstone on December 21, 1903, in New York City (he changed his name legally in 1940). He had an excellent education, obtaining a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1924 and a law degree from Columbia University in 1927.

Treat practiced law for only a short time. For many years he had wanted to write, and he was writing poetry while still in law school. He had practiced law for only three months when his firm broke up in 1928, and the partners gave him ten weeks’ salary (three hundred dollars). He determined to devote his time to writing. He went to Paris, wrote poetry and worked at odd jobs, and roomed with an old camp counselor and his wife in Brittany. Treat soon came to realize that even if he were a much better poet, he would still be unable to make a living at that craft. A mystery magazine he picked up in a Paris bookstore changed his career. Treat’s earliest contributions to mystery fiction were picture puzzles, some of which were collected in Bringing Sherlock Home (1930).

After returning to the United States, he married Margery Dallet in June, 1930. During the 1930’s, a period of frustration and indecision, he began writing for pulp mystery magazines (he wrote about three hundred short stories and twenty novels during his lifetime). His marriage to Margery ended in divorce in 1939. During a period of frustration and indecision, he discovered the world of detective magazines and reasoned that his legal background and literary interests made him well qualified to succeed in that field. He learned his trade by writing one story per day for a solid month.

Treat’s early detective novels featuring the highly intellectual and academically oriented Carl Wayward were well written and received favorable reviews. Yet they were stuck in the conventional mold of the British or classic mystery and did not represent a significant contribution to the genre. During the latter years of World War II, he met two laboratory researchers who stimulated him to take a fresh approach. He also took a seminar in police supervisory work and became acquainted with many working police officers. This experience led to his publication in 1945 of “V” as in Victim, the first police procedural ever written.

Treat published hundreds of short stories in such magazines as Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. While living in Yorktown Heights, New York, he taught mystery writing at Columbia University, New York University, and elsewhere. He married Rose Ehrenfreund in 1943; they moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1972.

He received two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, the first in 1965 for “H as in Homicide” (1964), and the second in 1978 for The Mystery Writer’s Handbook (1976) from the Mystery Writers of America, of which he was both a founder and a president.

Analysis

Lawrence Treat received a much better education than the typical mystery writer, and the positive and negative effects of it are evident in his writings. His first mystery novels feature Carl Wayward, a college professor with marked tendencies toward social and intellectual snobbishness. Wayward is not exactly an amateur sleuth, the favored protagonist of the classic school of mystery fiction; he specializes in criminology, which gets him involved in cases as a consultant, not unlike the great Sherlock Holmes. Yet Wayward seems to be perpetually on sabbatical, and his supposed knowledge of criminology rarely surfaces during his investigations. He is indistinguishable from the typical amateur sleuth, who takes up investigations out of idle curiosity or sympathy for someone involved and whose immensely superior intellect enables him to make fools of the bumbling police.

“H” as in Hangman

“H” as in Hangman (1942) is probably the best and most characteristic of the four Carl Wayward novels. It is set in Chautauqua, the famous resort founded in the nineteenth century to bring enlightenment to the masses. Wayward is there to lecture on criminal psychology; his professional contempt for this system of popular adult education is such, however, that it is difficult for the reader to understand why he has chosen to participate at all. Most of the principal characters are American equivalents of the upper-and upper-middle-class types found in typical British mysteries of the classic school, such as those of Agatha Christie. They lounge on porches sipping tea and lemonade, discussing highbrow subjects or gossiping rather viciously about absent acquaintances. The few who are not being supported by relatives or inherited property are vaguely involved in “stocks and bonds” or some other elitist occupation that pays well without demanding much of their attention. Wayward himself is able to spend most of his time leaning against something with his left hand in the side pocket of his tweed jacket. It is a closed environment, the sine qua non of the classic school, which conveniently limits the number of suspects to a manageable handful of known and socially acceptable individuals when the first murder is committed.

The victim, an elderly music professor who has been a leader in the Chautauqua movement for decades, is found hanged in the bell tower shortly after he or his murderer has alerted the whole community that something dastardly was afoot by playing the bells at an ungodly hour. The carillon performer did not choose anything vulgar such as “Pop Goes the Weasel” but played a portion of “Ase’s Death” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (1867). Instead of a rope, the dead man was hanged with a cello string. Such “smart aleck kills,” which Raymond Chandler reviled, are characteristic of the classic school of detective fiction. The leisure-class characters, the circumscribed setting in which the soon-to-be suspects are almost formally introduced, the tidbits of culture and arcane information, the gothic overtones of the modus operandi, and the incompetent sheriff who begs Wayward for help are some of the features that mark the Wayward novels as derivative ventures. They also strike the reader as an excessive display of knowledge.

Treat’s Wayward novels show intelligence and literary talent. He had started with aspirations to write poetry and quality mainstream novels and, like Ross Macdonald in later years, had had to step down in class for pragmatic reasons. Critics recognized the quality of his writing and praised his Wayward novels. Nevertheless, he dropped his intellectual hero unceremoniously in 1943; two years later, he produced a mystery novel that not only represented a quantum leap forward in his writing career but also became a landmark in the genre.

“V” as in Victim

“V” as in Victim, published in 1945, is regarded as the first police procedural. It is such a dramatic departure from the Wayward novels that it seems not to have been written by the same person. Set in the heart of Manhattan, it conveys a feeling not unlike that of the noir literature and films that had been flourishing during the war years. As in many of the novels by Cornell Woolrich, the people in “V ”as in Victim seem dwarfed and intimidated by their towering, dehumanized environment. Treat’s language, too, departed radically from the gracefully turned phrases in the Wayward books: His police procedurals sound American rather than Anglophilic. A few elitist characters remain, but now they seem to be living on borrowed time. They have discovered adultery and dry martinis.

It is interesting to speculate on what factors could have caused such a remarkable change in the whole approach of a writer. Treat has not discussed this subject in print, but clues can be garnered from his books, facts of his personal life, and the period during which he matured as a writer. He went through a divorce; then there was the war. He was not personally involved, but there are many indications in his books, notably in “H” as in Hunted (1946), that as a sensitive, artistic person he was strongly affected by reports of the atrocities that were perpetrated in Europe and Asia during those fateful years. Treat was undoubtedly influenced by the Black Mask school of writers, including Dashiell Hammett. Motion pictures must have been another influence: They became more proletarian and less elitist during the war years and have remained so ever since. There was the beginning of the so-called white flight from the big cities that would undermine the tax base and result in physical and moral deterioration. There was the influx of minorities, all suspicious, hostile, and alienated in the minds of many white Americans. Big cities in the United States were becoming sinister places. All these undercurrents of change can be felt in “V” as in Victim, published in that historic year of 1945, when Germany surrendered and atom bombs were dropped on Japan.

One of the positive effects of Treat’s extensive formal education was his intellectual discipline. When he decided to write a realistic novel about working police officers, he went about it with a thoroughness worthy of another lawyer-mystery writer, Erle Stanley Gardner. Treat’s exposure to real hard-nosed officers in the precinct station, in the laboratories, in the field, and after hours in the taprooms undoubtedly had a strong influence on his writing. He also did much academic-type research. In his preface to The Mystery Writer’s Handbook (1976), he reveals his wide knowledge of the literature covering various aspects of the crime field, including law, forensic medicine, ballistics, and fingerprinting. Carl Wayward may have been a criminologist in name, but his creator actually became one. Because “V ”as in Victim was to have such an important influence, it was fortunate for the development of this subgenre that Treat was a learned and conscientious practitioner of his craft.

There was an inherent contradiction within the police procedural from its very beginnings. Treat wanted to create realistic officers going about their work in a realistic manner, but at the same time he wanted to retain the traditional element of mystery—that is, the process of discovering who among a limited cast of clearly established characters committed a particular crime. In reality, many crimes are never solved or even investigated but merely documented; the records are then held in open files until someone informs or confesses. Police officers do not have the luxury of working on only one case at a time, like the private eye or amateur sleuth. They are often yanked off one case and assigned to another because there are too many murderers and not enough detectives. In the process of tailing a suspect or questioning informants, police officers may come on a different crime that will lead them off on a tangent. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a limited cast of interrelated suspects in a city of millions of strangers. Any attempt to impose artificial boundaries around an urban crime would only lead to absurdity.

“H” as in Hunted and Lady, Drop Dead

Treat recognized these problems and tried various means to get around them without giving up the traditional mystery. In “H” as in Hunted, for example, his focal character is a man who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis and who has come back to New York to confront the coward who betrayed him. Jub Freeman becomes involved because he is a boyhood friend of the protagonist, but by focusing on a civilian, Treat is able to limit his story to a single mystery and a single cast of suspects.

Unfortunately, this approach weakens the book as a police procedural and makes it more like a Cornell Woolrich-type novel of private vengeance. In Lady, Drop Dead (1960), the feckless Mitch Taylor is involved in the story, but the protagonist is a private detective, which makes this police procedural veer dangerously close to being a private-eye novel reminiscent of Raymond Chandler.

Eventually, Treat moved his three sustaining characters, Taylor, Freeman, and Decker, out of New York, evidently hoping that the traditional mystery element in his plots would seem less incongruous in a smaller city. Yet though you can take a writer out of New York, you cannot always take New York out of a writer. Treat’s unidentified city seems like an older and less hectic New York but is still too big and impersonal to provide a comfortable home for the apparatus of the traditional British mystery yarn. Lady, Drop Dead, the last of the Taylor/Freeman/Decker series, still reads like a set piece. Its limited cast of suspects is assembled in a classic finale so that the real murderer—who is the one the reader most suspected simply because he is the one who seemed least likely—can break down and unburden his conscience with a detailed confession.

The police procedural has evolved and proliferated since Lady, Drop Dead was published in 1960, but Treat did not participate in its development. His formal education may have saddled him with too much esteem for tradition and thus been an inhibiting factor. His police procedurals, like his Carl Wayward novels, seem to belong to an older, safer, much slower-moving world, but he deserves great credit for having originated this fascinating form of mystery fiction.

Principal Series Characters:

• Carl Wayward , a psychology professor specializing in criminology, becomes involved in murder cases as a consultant but quickly takes charge. He is in his thirties, and he is married during the course of the series. An intellectual, he is motivated by the challenge of matching wits with criminals and utilizing his expertise.
• Mitch Taylor is a typical big-city cop, mainly interested in avoiding trouble, bucking for promotion, and living simply with his wife and children. He is proud of his uniform and has a sense of duty but is not above minor graft and avoiding work whenever possible.
• Jub Freeman , who sometimes teams up with Taylor, is a “new type” of cop whose passion is scientific detection. He is married during the course of the series. In his forays into the field to gather evidence, he displays a certain gaucheness in dealing with the public.
• Lieutenant Bill Decker , in charge of the Homicide Division, knows how to handle cops—with a pat on the back and a kick in the pants. He lets his officers break rules and cut corners when necessary. Decker was the prototype of hundreds of tough-talking, hard-driving fictional successors.

Bibliography

Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982. One of the first major studies of the subgenre pioneered by Lawrence Treat.

“Lawrence Treat, Ninety-four, Prolific Mystery Writer.” The New York Times, January 16, 1998, p. B11. Obituary of Treat details his contributions to mystery and detective fiction.

Panek, LeRoy Lad. The American Police Novel: A History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Traces the evolution of the police procedural and Treat’s influence on the subgenre. Bibliographic references and index.

Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. This study of Victorian crime fiction should be read as a prehistory of the American police procedural; shows the state of narrative conventions inherited by Treat and throws his contribution into greater relief.

Vicarel, Jo Ann. A Reader’s Guide to the Police Procedural. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Geared to the mainstream reader, this study introduces and analyzes the police procedural form. Provides a perspective on Treat’s work.

Washer, Robert. Review of “P” as in Police, by Lawrence Treat. The Queen Canon Bibliophile 3 (April, 1971): 18. Review of Treat’s collection of short crime fiction.