Trent’s Last Case
A review of Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley – 240822
One of the three best detective stories ever written, according to Agatha Christie, and one to which every detective writer owes something, consciously or subconsciously in Dorothy L Sayers’ opinion, Trent’s Last Case, originally published in 1913 and also known as The Woman in Black, holds an iconic status in the development of the genre. Curiously, Edmund Bentley today is perhaps better known for inventing the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics which bear his middle name.
It is always difficult from this distance to get a sense of what the contemporary reader would have found groundbreaking in Bentley’s approach and to assess its impact. For me the surprise came when John Marlowe looks in the car rear view mirror and sees the look on Sigsbee Manderson’s face and realizes that he has been set up. A little research led to my discovering that that standard piece of motoring equipment and the bane of the learner driver’s life was not patented until the early 1920s and was a very unusual feature, although one that a plutocrat might have installed.
Probably what was really intended to shock and surprise is that what seemed a logical solution to the mystery of Manderson’s death, pieced together from disparate clues ranging from the state of the victim’s clothing and, particularly, his shoes – Manderson had a bit of a shoe fetish – to the fact that he went out without his dentures by the amateur sleuth, Philip Trent and revealed halfway through the book, is only part of the answer. Two more layers of complexity are added to Trent’s foundations as the book progresses, both by way of confessions, the last intended to be quite a twist and a shock.
Perhaps because I have read so many stories where the initial theory proves to be inadequate, becoming one of Sayers’ subconscious borrowings, it did not seem to have the same powerful effect that it must have had when it was originally published. The impact was further diluted by the fact that I had already got the real agent of Manderson’s death in my sights. The denouement, though, was so devastating to Trent that he vowed to give up sleuthing for good, hence the book’s title.
In her review, Kate Jackson floats the idea that Bentley might have had in mind a satire of the nascent genre and I have some sympathy with that reading of the novel. Bentley was trying to get away from the omniscient supersleuth that the likes of Conan Doyle had created, preferring a character who was human with human fallibilities, so much so that they doubt their abilities and retire gracefully. He did not return to Trent for another twenty-three years, which suggests that he had done with the genre by pointing out some of its absurdities.
Manderson is the archetypal villainous victim over whom the reader is invited to share little sympathy and the first chapter which goes to great lengths to establish his status in the financial world, his ruthless methods and the imminence of a shock on the stock exchange to lull the reader to thinking that his death is business related. However, as Trent quickly establishes, the real root of the mystery lies in his fractured relationship with his wife, Mabel, and his suspicions of a love triangle. Trent is so taken by the image of the widow dressed in black, sitting on a rock, that he becomes besotted with her and allows his feelings to cloud his judgment.
It is a case where the sleuth decides to suppress the truth and one in which the police, led by Inspector Murch of the Yard, fail to get anywhere near the solution, allowing Trent to play judge and jury, another trope that was to find favour with later crime writers. Bentley’s style is a little wordy but there is a sense of pace to the story, except for a curious and overlong chapter where Trent broods over Mabel that a more brutal editor would have excised, and on the whole makes for a satisfying read. However, from this time perspective it lacks the wow factor that it once undoubtedly had.
