Shedunnit, and Trent’s Last Case

Trent’s Last Case by EC Bentley

published 1913

 

Caroline Crampton’s Shedunnit podcast is a great favourite round here, and when she said she was doing an episode on Trent’s Last Case I realized that this was the moment to reread it for the first time in more than 30 years. The podcast has carefully signposted ‘Spoiler Zones’, so I wanted to be able to make the most of that.

The book is legendary, seen as a high point in detective fiction, with various trustworthy people saying ‘it will never be bettered – it will survive forever’.

I remembered reading it and thinking it was OK. This time I thought it was long and quite dull, with enjoyable moments.

But being able to listen to Caroline discussing it with Flex and Herds was incredibly helpful in explaining what people liked about it in the past, and bringing a modern perspective to it as well. I very much recommend the podcast:

Shedunnit: Trent’s Last Case  

- there is also a transcript.

[I have been a guest with the hilarious and joyous crime experts Flex and Herds, and you can find out more about them in my report here. I am proud to say I have been a frequent guest on Shedunnit too]

So what’s the deal with this book?

Philip Trent is a journalist and painter, with a reputation for solving crimes. He gets involved when a very rich financier, Sigsbee Manderson, is found dead at his country estate, and he painstakingly investigates, following up on alibis, timings, fingerprints. Many people – of course – might have had motives to kill Manderson, who was a nasty piece of work. He left behind a grieving widow, beautiful and much younger.

This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen….

Her hat lay pinned to the grass beside her, and the lively breeze played with her thick dark hair, blowing backward the two broad bandeaux that should have covered much of her forehead, and agitating a hundred tiny curls from the mass gathered at her nape.

Everything about this lady was black, from her shoes of suede to the hat that she had discarded; lustreless black covered her to her bare throat. All she wore was fine and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as her looks declared her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as only a woman grown can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and had her touch of primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so admirably curved now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the suggestion of French taste in her clothes, she made a very modern figure seated there…

Guess where that’s going.

In fact, nearly everything I thought about it is said so much better by Caroline on the podcast and in her accompanying notes that I am just going to “quote” (ie copy) her extensively.

The big conclusion (for me) is this: Bentley is mysteriously parodying, very cleverly, a genre that doesn’t exist yet. The book reads like a classic Golden Age mystery, but in a knowing way, as if he had read every similar book written between, say, 1920 and 1933, and was gently mocking them.

Caroline puts it this way:

“This book is full of fingerprint clues, red herrings, seemingly unbreakable alibis, a closed circle of suspects who all hated the murder victim, and more….a lot of the time he is parodying these tropes, almost as if he is poking fun at a genre (the puzzle mystery) that doesn't properly exist yet…

It is just mind boggling to me still that this important origin point for a whole genre is a parody of said genre before it even existed. That feels like some kind of time loop literary theory stuff…

I can't imagine what it would've been like to read this book cold in 1913. I think I would've found it confusing, possibly annoying, and maybe would've just gone back to reading G.K. Chesterton instead…”

And she makes the point that if the traditional mystery HADN’T taken off, then this book would probably be forgotten.

Does she have a suggestion as to how this happened? She does:

“I think it reads this way because the principal authors in this genre post WWI were all obsessed with this book — they adored it, studied it closely, and then cherry picked its best bits to develop further their own work.”

I strongly suggest you read the book, then listen to the podcast for more brilliant perceptions – I have skimmed the surface!

The author’s full name, by the way, is Edmund Clerihew Bentley, and he was the inventor of the clerihew – short biographical joke verses.

Picture: George Lambert 1914