Sleep Long, My Love was published by Doubleday in 1959, and it consolidates the procedural method Waugh had established seven years earlier. Like Last Seen Wearing, it concerns a missing woman in a Connecticut community — but where the earlier novel was set in a college town, this one takes place in the suburbs, and the domestic setting gives the investigation a different texture: the secrets being uncovered are those of marriage, adultery, and the gap between the prosperous surface of suburban life and the desperation beneath.
The investigation proceeds with the same methodical patience: interviews, phone records, financial trails, the gradual construction of a timeline from fragmentary evidence. But Waugh is also developing his characterization of the police investigators — their professional pride, their frustrations with uncooperative witnesses and political interference, and the toll that violent crime takes on those who investigate it daily.
The novel was praised by Julian Symons (the dean of British crime criticism) as one of the finest procedurals ever written — a judgment that has been endorsed by subsequent critics. Its achievement is to make the routine of police work compelling as narrative without falsifying it through artificial excitement.
Collecting Sleep Long, My Love
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1959): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $15–$40