Sometimes, a work is so influential that it vanishes. I mean that the influence becomes so widespread it is almost invisible; no-one can imagine that anything was ever any different. I think that is what has happened with that fine Edwardian detective story Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913.
As far as I know, it was the first such story to feature the false solution, which became a convention that has proved remarkably enduring in the crime genre. Indeed, the other night, I was watching a recent Belgian detective drama on the TV and there it was, near the end, the confession that seemed to wrap things up neatly – or did it?
In Trent’s Last Case, the investigator makes an assumption about what has happened early on in his work on the case. He allows his heart to rule his head. He finds out eventually that he has been completely mistaken, and goes back to find the true solution to the murder mystery. He thinks he has succeeded only for there to be a further surprising twist right at the end, when the real perpetrator is revealed. Philip Trent, amateur sleuth, declares that he will not investigate again, hence the title.
This is an elegantly written and highly readable novel. It’s a serious story but with a neat touch of humour. The characters are drawn in some depth; indeed I used to think that if Ford Madox Ford had written a crime story it would have come out something like this. The murder victim, a ruthless American business tycoon, is a thoroughly dislikeable individual. Present-day readers might think that some things never change.
It seems to be sending up the conventions of the genre before they have become firmly established, pre-dating as it does the earliest works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and the “Golden Age” of the detective story. Both those writers admired Bentley’s book. Margery Allingham borrowed directly from it.
Bentley wrote Trent partly as a riposte to the Holmes stories, which he did not like. He was a friend of G K Chesterton’s and presumably preferred the more humanist and intuitive approach of the Father Brown stories, the first of which had appeared in 1910, to the cold and logical Holmes.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley is best remembered today for the comic verse form that bears his middle name. I think Trent’s Last Case is due for a revival. There’s always a pleasure in going right to the source and it’s a much better read than many of the detective stories that it inspired.
The Good Reader 