Trent's Last Case by E C Bentley

Trent's Last Case by E C Bentley

Trent's Last Case (1913) is a detective novel by E.C. Bentley. Adapted three times for the cinema--including a 1952 feature film starring Michael Wilding, Orson Welles, and Margaret Lockwood--Trent's Last Case, which was titled The Woman in Black in the U.S., earned the acclaim of such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, and was followed by a sequel and a collection of short stories involving its main character.

When Sigsbee Manderson, a prominent American plutocrat, is murdered at his country estate in southwest England, Philip Trent, an amateur detective and freelance journalist, is hired to investigate the case. Aided by police, Trent begins his examination of the facts and evidence. Granted access to the body as well as the grounds of White Gables, Manderson's estate, Trent concludes his investigation with a series of interviews. Beginning with Manderson's wife, he uses his journalistic skill to collect information from the plutocrat's secretaries, servant, and maid, as well as Nathaniel Cupples, Mrs. Manderson's uncle and an old friend of Trent's. When the coroner's report is released, and in coordination with his own research, evidence suggests that Manderson was murdered due to some unknown business vendetta. There is reason to believe, however, that his death could have something to do with his troubled marriage, a possibility complicated by Trent's growing attraction to Mabel, his widow. Unable to reach a conclusion, Trent embarks for Latvia to work as a traveling correspondent, but no matter how much time or distance he places between himself and White Gables, the questions and the mystery remain. Trent's Last Case is a masterful detective novel by a writer whose reputation has unjustly faded over the past several decades.

This edition of E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case is a classic of English detective fiction reimagined for modern readers.

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Bentley was born in 1875 and educated at St Paul's School in London, where he met and became friends with famed critic and author G K Chesterton. Bentley began a long career in journalism in 1902, serving on the editorial staff of the Daily News for 10 years and the Daily Telegraph for another twenty. He wrote Biography for Beginners (using the alias E Clerihew) in 1905, which was a collection of four-line nonsense verse dubbed Clerihews (in his honor), which became as popular as the limerick form. In 1929 and 1939, two more volumes were published. Trent's Final Case (1913), Bentley's masterpiece, was created in irritation at Sherlock Holmes' infallibility and heralded the start of a new age in detective fiction.

Indeed, it has long been considered as the first really modern mystery and the beginning of the 'Golden Era of Crime Fiction.' Trent's Own Case, the sequel, didn't come out for another twenty-three years, and was subsequently followed by Trent Intervenes, a collection of short stories. Agatha Christie called Trent's Final Case one of the three best detective stories ever written, and Dorothy L Sayers said, It is the one detective story of the twenty-first century that I am positive will go down to posterity as a classic. It's a work of art.