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About the Author, Lawrence Treat:

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Lawrence Treat, a three-time Edgar Allan Poe Award Winner, is frequently called the "father" of modern police procedural novel. Treat himself did not accept the honour, although his early novels paved way to the radio and television police series Dragnet, John Creasey's Gideon stories, and Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. (See also Chester Himes and his series of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones.) But as a pioneer in mystery genre, Treat developed a narrative framework, which differed from the traditional detective story, where the story centers on a single person, like Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Maigret. In Treat's novels there is a group of police detectives with family problems. They have conflicts inside departments, and work under-staffed too long hours. The formula, which he started in the 1940s, have since been used repeatedly in books, movies, and television series. Lawrence Treat was a New Yorker, who graduated from Darthmouth in 1924 and attained a law degree from Columbia in 1927. He worked as a lawyer, but then moved to Paris in 1928, and started to write mystery stories. Treat's earliest contributions to mystery fiction were picture puzzles, some of which were collected in BRINGING SHERLOCK HOME (1930). After returning in the United States, Treat devoted himself to writing and produced 17 novels and over 300 short stories. His first novel, RUN FAR, RUN FAST (1937) was published under the name Goldstone. Under the pseudonym Treat he launched in 1940 his first four-book series featuring the criminologist Carl Wayward. Treat was one of the founders of Mystery Writers of America in 1945 in New York City. Treat also served MWA's president and director. He won twice the Edgar Allan Poe Award, in 1965 for the short story 'H as in Homicide,' which first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazie, and in 1978 for editing the MYSTERY WRITERS' HANDBOOK. Treat was a prize-winner at the Crime Writers' International short story contest held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1981. He received a special Edgar Allan Poe award for his TV story on the Alfred Hitchcock program. Treat lived with his artist wife, Rosa, on Martha's Vineyard. He died on January 7, 1998, in Oak Bluffs, Massachussetts.

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The top mystery writers in America tell how to make the tension mount and keep the reader unaware of "whodunit" until the very end.