Trent's Last Case

Super boring. Read it because it was one of the first murder mysteries of it's time but it was hard to get through unfortunately.

In 1944 the famous hard-boiled mystery writer Raymond Chandler published an influential essay titled "The Simple Art of Murder" in which he praised the hard-boiled mystery fiction of Dashiell Hammett and disparaged the supposed lack of realism in earlier mysteries, including TRENT'S LAST CASE (1913). The chief fault he found with it was that no millionaire would do X to himself just to take vengeance on another person (read Chandler's essay to see what X might be). The only problem with Chandler's statement is that he is wrong! The millionaire did NOT do what Chandler says he did. And yet several "standard" reference books quote or paraphrase Chandler as if he were right. (Now THAT IS A MYSTERY. Do critics occasionally plagiarize from others without reading the books they comment on? Or do they just have faulty memories? Or are they deliberately playing fast and loose with facts and trusting that nobody can tell the difference? Or what?) TRENT'S LAST CASE is actually a very cleverly plotted mystery novel that has two major twists AFTER Philip Trent believes he has solved the shooting of millionaire Sigsbee Manderson. What this essentially means (SEMI-SPOILER ALERT) is that Trent has been mistaken in his first solution--and that the second solution, which is handed to him by another person (the one that Chandler and others seem to be remembering) is ALSO mistaken. The final twist, which occurs naturally enough in the last few pages, provides the REAL solution (which Chandler and others appear to have forgotten). Anyway, these twists (which neither Trent nor most readers could foresee) are plausible enough when they have been laid out for us, and they provide us with most of the pleasure of the story. The main fault I find with this mystery is that the embedded love story (which does serve a key role in the overall plot) does not seem believable to me. (Other readers may differ, and indeed readers of 1913 might have considered it totally in line with how people felt and acted back then.) If you read and enjoy this novel, the good news is that E. C. Bentley later wrote 13 good short mystery stories about Philip Trent that are prequels to this book. Twelve of them were published in TRENT INTERVENES (1938), and the last one, titled "The Ministering Angel," appeared in THE STRAND magazine in Nov. 1938 and has been anthologized in at least 3 books that are fairly easy to find.

E. C. Bentley (July 10, 1875 - March 30, 1956), was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. Born in London, Bentley worked as a journalist on several newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. His first published collection of poetry, titled Biography for Beginners (1905), popularized the clerihew form; it was followed by two other collections, in 1929 and 1939. His detective novel, Trent's Last Case (1913), was much praised, numbering Dorothy L. Sayers among its admirers, and with its labyrinthine and mystifying plotting can be seen as the first truly modern mystery. The success of the work inspired him, after only 23 years, to write a sequel, Trent's Own Case (1936). All lovers of the genre of mystery will enjoy his work immensely.

Trent makes a lasting impression in this, his first, last and only appearance. Appearing in 1913, "Trent's Last Case" is among the first classic English country murder mysteries. It's all butlers, country houses, motor-cars and dressing for dinner, sprinkled with wry observations on the manners of the wealthy, country folk, inn keepers, servants upstairs and downstairs, police inspectors, husbands, widows, American secretaries and French maids. We begin with our man Trent arriving in town to investigate a murder. The plot is brisk, without enough clues to make it a whodunit. Trent's an established painter with a national reputation as an amateur detective and newspaper correspondent. An amateur sleuth would be incomplete without a nemesis, so we have a long-time friendly rival, Inspector Murth. The presumption of a long history and the effortlessness of the characters' interactions was drawn beautifully. All is revealed through what the characters say and do, not by long narrative descriptions. I rather wish this was only the beginning for Trent and not the end.

Actually Trent's last case is his first - and his last: E. C. Bentley didn't write another full-length novel (although there is a disappointing collection of short-stories entitled 'Trent Intervenes', I think; the only edition of this I have seen was in the green and white Penguin crime classics). The importance of 'Trent's Last Case' is that it helped to shape a new paradigm in British detective stories: witty, social acute, conservative (to the point of looking down on 'trade'), and flippant bordering on frivolous. We have Bentley to thank for Allingham, Christie, Crispin, Hare, Innes, and Sayers; the alternative could have been more tedious imitators of the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes.

A stupendous mystery; one of the best I have ever read. Fans of Christie or Chesterton will thoroughly enjoy it. To say more might give something away, so I will not.