The Con Game was published by Doubleday in 1968, one of the Fred Fellows series of police procedurals that Waugh began in 1959 with Sleep Long, My Love. Chief Fred Fellows of Stockford, Connecticut, investigates the murder of a confidence man whose schemes have ensnared several prominent citizens — a premise that allows Waugh to explore both the mechanics of fraud and the psychology of victims who are too embarrassed to report their losses.
The novel demonstrates the procedural form’s adaptability: the same patient, methodical approach that works for missing-persons cases works equally well for financial crime, where the evidence is documentary rather than physical and the obstacles are legal (banking privacy, reluctant witnesses) rather than physical. Fellows must reconstruct the dead man’s network of swindles before he can identify who had sufficient motive — and sufficient anger — to commit murder.
Waugh’s Stockford is a precisely observed New England community: prosperous, respectable, Protestant, and harboring the particular vulnerabilities that respectability creates. The con man’s victims are people who could not admit to being fooled because admission would expose their own greed, their own willingness to believe in something too good to be true.
Collecting The Con Game
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1968): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $5–$15