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‘SOME time in the year 1910 it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to write a detective story of a new sort …’

Thus begins E. C. Bentley’s discussion of his famous novel, Trent’s Last Case. In his 1940 autobiography, Those Days, he devotes an entire chapter to the genesis of what has become one of the most famous milestones in the genre. He continues:

‘It should be possible I thought, to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as a human being … It was not until I had gone a long way with the plot that the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution to the mystery turn out to be completely wrong … In the result, it does not seem to have been generally noticed that Trent’s Last Case is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.’

In the year 1910 the market for detective short stories was thriving. Sherlock Holmes had dominated for the previous two decades since his first Strand appearance, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891). R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke, one of the earliest, and certainly the most persuasive, of the forensic detectives—Freeman was a medical doctor—had been investigating in both short story and novel since 1907 and, as Bentley was considering his contribution to the genre, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud were embarking on their crime-solving careers. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard and Victor L. Whitechurch’s Thorpe Hazell in Thrilling Stories of the Railway were also among the dozens of detectives—most of them now long forgotten—appearing regularly in the popular magazines. The stage was set for a ‘detective story of a new sort’…

Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born in London in 1875; he won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford and it was while studying Law in London that he began writing for various newspapers and magazines including, for ten years, the Daily News. Although called to the Bar in 1902, most of his working life was spent at the Daily Telegraph, beginning in 1912; although he ‘retired’ from journalism in 1934, with the outbreak of WWII and the call-up of younger men, he returned as literary critic in 1939, eventually leaving in 1947.

More whimsically, Bentley was also the originator of the four-line metrically-irregular verse that became known as the ‘Clerihew’. The earliest example dates from 1905:

‘Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.’

He made the acquaintance of G. K. Chesterton while at school and they remained lifelong friends; both were journalists and poets, novelists and short story writers; and, perhaps not surprisingly, their approach to detective fiction, each eschewing the idea of a Great Detective, was also similar. Later in their lives, both also were destined to be President of the Detection Club; Chesterton was its first President and, after his death in 1936, Bentley assumed the Presidential Robes—literally and figuratively—for the next thirteen years. While Bentley, in Those Days, refutes the story that Chesterton had wagered him that he couldn’t write a detective story, he does admit that ‘[Chesterton] urged me to write a story of that sort’; and acknowledges this in an affectionate dedication.

Although he had never written a novel, Bentley felt that ‘It should be possible to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as a human being and was not so much the “heavy” sleuth.’ He tried, in his creation of a detective character, to get as far away from Holmes, the ‘Great Detective’, as possible. So, as he explained in a 1935 essay, Philip Trent:

‘… does not take himself at all seriously. He is not a scientific expert; he is not a professional crime investigator. He is an artist … who has strayed accidentally into the business of crime journalism because he found he had an aptitude for it, and without any sense of having a mission. He is not superior to the feelings of average humanity … he even goes so far as to fall in love. He does not regard the Scotland Yard men as bungling half-wits, but has the highest respect for their trained abilities. All very unlike Holmes.’

He planned the novel over a period of six to eight weeks, much of it while walking from his home in Hampstead to the offices of the Daily News; in fact, most of Trent’s Last Case’s creation was done on Bentley’s feet—either walking or writing at his ‘standing-up desk’ in his Fleet Street office. And like—one hopes!—most writers of detective fiction, he began by drafting the last chapter. The eponymous detective was originally called Philip Gasket but this was amended to the monosyllabic ‘Trent’ when the novel appeared in the US, in March 1913 as The Woman in Black (Chapter VII is ‘The Lady in Black’), a title it retained in America for the next eighteen years.

Another famous crime writer, John Buchan, was responsible for the UK publication. Buchan, whose archetypal The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is as celebrated and influential in the thriller genre as Bentley’s book is in the detective genre, was a partner in the British publishing firm, Nelson’s. Both men knew each other from their Oxford days and, when Bentley sought his advice, Buchan was so impressed by the manuscript that he immediately made an offer to publish it. When it appeared, also in March 1913, Nelson’s retained the US amendment to the detective’s name, but restored Bentley’s original title.

In planning the novel Bentley had listed some characters and situations then—and for many years following—considered necessary in a detective story: a murdered millionaire, his widow, her maid, a male secretary, a butler, a gifted amateur detective, a not-too-gifted policeman and a ‘perfect’ alibi; and they all duly appear. But in demonstrating his detective’s susceptibility to ‘the feelings of average humanity’, Bentley, very daringly, has him fall in love with one of the chief suspects. Will this cloud Trent’s deductive abilities? Will it, perhaps, prejudice his dedication to justice? Will it influence his solution?

And while Trent, and the reader, grapple with these conundrums, Bentley slyly detonates a plotting landmine … an even more ground-breaking innovation which immediately qualified Trent’s Last Case for a permanent place on the shelf of The Great Detective Novels. However, as Bentley pointed out: ‘… it does not seem to have been noticed that [the novel] is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.’ (All will become clear after you’ve read the novel.)

Chesterton considered Trent’s Last Case ‘… a real detective story that is also a real book’, while Dorothy L. Sayers, in an introduction to a reprint of the novel, asserted that ‘every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence’. Howard Haycraft, author of Murder For Pleasure (1945), the ground-breaking history of detective fiction, credited the novel ‘with changing the whole course of [detective fiction]’. Two later commentators, Leroy Lad Panek, in his 1979 Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Story in Britain 1914-1939, thought it ‘the bible of the detective-writer’s craft’; and Eric Routley dubbed it simply, in his The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story (1972) ‘the first great detective novel’.

More than twenty years after Trent’s debut Bentley wrote, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, Trent’s Own Case (1936) and, alone, a collection of much-anthologised short stories, Trent Intervenes (1938). He contributed to the early collaborative efforts of the Detection Club, Behind the Screen and The Scoop in 1930 and 1931; and in 1938 edited an impressive anthology, The Second Century of Detective Stories. A final novel, the disappointing thriller Elephant’s Work, followed in 1950. But his reputation as a detective story writer rests almost entirely on his first detective novel. He died in London in March 1956.

Trent’s Last Case was filmed in 1920 in a silent version and again in 1929, an adaptation released in both silent and sound versions—both ‘bad beyond description’ according to Bentley—and then in 1952 with Orson Welles, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Wilding.

As one of the earliest defining detective novels of the twentieth century, all detective fiction (as well as ‘every detective writer’) owes a debt to Trent’s Last Case. It established the detective novel, rather than the short story, as the new field of play for writer and reader in which the next refinements in the genre were to occur. Bentley’s experimentation—with a detective who, unlike predecessors, is a fallible human being—within a cleverly constructed plot, culminating in a surprise solution, prepared readers for the advent of an era in which they would learn to expect the unexpected. Trent’s Last Case heralded, in fact, detective fiction’s Golden Age.

DR JOHN CURRAN

November 2016