Trent's Last Case

by E.C. Bentley

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 224
Series: Philip Trent #1
Rating:

Synopsis:

Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong.

Trent’s Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth as they probe ever deeper in search of a solution to a mystery filled with odd, mysterious twists and turns.

Called by Agatha Christie "one of the best detective stories ever written," Trent's Last Case delights with its flesh-and-blood characters, its naturalness and easy humor, and its style, which, as Dorothy Sayers has noted, "ranges from a vividly coloured rhetoric to a delicate and ironical literary fancy."

I was very curious to read E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, knowing that Dorothy L. Sayers greatly admired it. It’s definitely more in Sayers’ line than, say, Christie’s or Marsh’s, with a detective character who shares some DNA with Sayers’ Wimsey. He’s not quite as clearly characterised as Peter begins to be, and his piffle isn’t quite as outrageous, but he’s a definite precursor.

That said, the pacing feels really slow, and I found Trent a mite less charming. It’s always uncomfortable when a private detective character withholds information from the police, and that thread of the story (Trent’s interactions with Murch) swiftly disappeared in a way that felt outright odd, even if Trent decided not to share his info. The police are just letting you run around all over the place, are they? And you’re the only one who thought about fingerprints? And you’re going to keep quiet when you’re fairly certain about a murderer? Hmmm.

The other way in which this is like Sayers’ work is that the detective has a love story, and as in Strong Poison, it’s pretty intimately tied up with the mystery plot. It’s resolved within the book, though, rather than being something that develops well over time.

Overall, I did enjoy reading this; there are some bits of scene-setting and characterisation that feel really vivid, and the mystery is fun once we get somewhere with it. I’d read more of Bentley’s work.

Rating: 3/5