From the Bookshelf of Reading the Detectives…

Trent's Last Case (Philip Trent, #1)

E.C. Bentley

Start date: June 1, 2017

Finish date: June 30, 2017

Discussion: Group reads

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What Members Thought

Feb 11, 2017 SewingandCaring rated it liked it

More of a 3.5. The first of the Goldern Age mysteries. Far wordier than those which followed it, was a slog, why use one word when you can use 5 with more than four constants in each. Is worth reading and you can see exactly why it kicked off an entire genre but too much moralising for me to really enjoy.

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Aug 23, 2014 AngryGreyCat rated it really liked it

This mystery appears on many lists as one of the “must read” books for mystery fans. This is considered the first of the Golden age of Detective fiction books. Despite the title this is actually the first in the Trent books. Trent is an artist, who upon request does some investigating and solves mysteries. He is asked by a newspaper man to investigate the death of a wealthy financier. Philip Trent accepts and the fun begins … for the reader.

As a reader you need to keep in mind that this was the ...more

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Dec 27, 2018 Calum Fisher rated it liked it · review of another edition

Ripping stuff - simultaneously a farceur’s reaction to the solemnity of Poe, Doyle et al and the prototype for the golden age, so this amounts to a genre milestone. Worth noting that the golden age emerges from something close to a spoof. Unusually fine plotting, admirably ridiculous and tongue-in-cheek. Weighed down by leaden romantic subplot and bouts of tedious banter, alongside scientific-racist (marginal) plot details tho I’ve seen much worse

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Jun 17, 2017 Marcus Vinicius rated it really liked it

Shelves: mysteries

How can you solve a mystery?
Trent had a hard time in this story. The facts are unclear and the journalist detective, called an artist, struggled to grasp then. The death of an american millionaire and the characteristics of his life were at the center of this plot. The book has plenty of descriptions and the characters interacted in a crescendo. At the end, the murder was solved but now in a conventional way. This is a book written before de WWI. It contained the seeds of the british Golden Age ...more

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May 25, 2017 Jill rated it liked it

Although I liked the writing, I did not warm to Trent at all. The murderer turned out to be who I suspected from very early on in the book, and I did not appreciate the romance side of it at all.

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