Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Introduction

      I. SOUTHWARD BOUND

      II. A LITTLE SHEET OF PAPER

      III. DEATH OF A PHILANTHROPIST

IV. NOT HARD OF HEARING

V. TRENT IS TAKEN ABACK

VI. AN ARREST HAS BEEN MADE

       VII. ON A PLATE WITH PARSLEY ROUND IT

       VIII. THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE

       IX. THE TIARA OF MEGABYZUS

       X. A MATTER OF TEMPERAMENTS

       XI. IMPASSE

       XII. THE COUNT EXPLAINS

       XIII. FELIX POUBELLE 1884

       XIV. GENIUS MUST LIVE

       XV. EUNICE MAKES A CLEAN BREAST OF IT

       XVI. THE WHISPERED WORD

       XVII. FINE BODY OF MEN

       XVIII. INFORMATION RECEIVED

       XIX. RESURRECTION

       XX. A GOLF MATCH

       XXI. AUNT JUDITH KNITS

       The Detective Story Club

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      FEW detective novels published during ‘the Golden Age of Murder’ between the two world wars were as eagerly anticipated by crime fiction enthusiasts as Trent’s Own Case. The book first appeared in 1936, and within months its publishers Constable felt able to boast that it was the best crime novel of the year—quite a claim given that the competition included Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, one of the enduring classics of the genre. Yet despite its initial success, the book has long been out of print.

      Edmund Clerihew Bentley’s first novel, Trent’s Last Case (known as The Woman in Black in the US) had been published almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1913. A journalist, Bentley (1875–1956) had been struck by the thought ‘that it would be a good idea to write a detective story of a new sort’. Although he admired the Sherlock Holmes stories, he was sceptical about the concept of the Great Detective, and soon ‘the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution of the mystery turn out to be completely wrong. Why not show up the infallibility of the Holmesian method?’ The detective who proved all too human and error-prone was Philip Trent, a gentlemanly artist with a taste for amateur sleuthing. As the title of that first book suggests, Bentley had no thought of creating what is now known as a ‘series character’.

      But Fate often conspires to defeat an author’s intentions. Trent’s Last Case was so well-written, and its plot twists so appealing, that people took it at face value as a highly entertaining country house murder mystery rather than as a parody. It became a best-seller, and was filmed. The legendary thriller writer Edgar Wallace hailed the book as ‘a masterpiece’, while Dean Inge, a prominent cleric and avid crime fiction fan, said it was ‘the best detective story I ever read’. After the First World War, when ingenious mystery novels packed with suspects, clues, red herrings and twists became all the rage, Bentley’s book inspired a new generation of writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley.

      When Berkeley founded the Detection Club, a social network for leading detective writers, in 1930, Bentley’s lifelong friend G.K. Chesterton became the Club’s first President and Bentley was invited to become a founder member. Although he’d shown little appetite for building on the remarkable success of his debut, younger writers whom he’d influenced held him in high regard, and possibly it was encouragement from fellow Detection Club members that then helped to persuade Bentley to revive Philip Trent in a sequel.

      Trent’s Own Case was, however, a collaborative work, and the person who did most to urge Bentley to return to the fray was his co-author, Herbert Warner Allen (1881–1968), a wine expert and occasional crime writer. It seems likely that the majority of the writing was done by Bentley, although Trent was not the only recurring character. Warner Allen’s own creation, the wine merchant William Clerihew, had appeared in ‘Tokay of the Comet Year’, a short story published in 1930, and also in the book Mr Clerihew: Wine Merchant three years later. Here a champagne cork supplies a clue which is discussed between Trent and Clerihew in one of the most appealing scenes in the book. The Clerihew name was a hat-tip to Bentley, who had, long before, devised the humorous four-line