Trent’s Last Case. E. C. Bentley
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‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Thomas Nelson and Sons 1913
Copyright © Estate of E. C. Bentley 1913
Introduction © John Curran 2017
Afterword © Estate of Dorothy L. Sayers 1978
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1913, 2020
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008216269
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008216276
Version: 2020-06-24
Contents
‘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