Treat, Lawrence

Lawrence Treat was an American lawyer and author who started a trend in police procedural crime fiction that was later exploited by, among others, Ed McBain. Treat was born Lawrence Arthur Goldstone (he formally changed his name in 1940) in New York and graduated from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1924. He then attended Columbia University, New York, where he graduated with a degree in law in 1927. He had by that time already begun to work at his father’s law firm. When it was shut down in 1928 due to the recession, he travelled to France where he borrowed a house in Bretagne and began to write mystery stories. His first attempts, mysteries that the reader’s were asked to solve, were published in magazines; some were later collected in the book Bringing Sherlock Home (1935).