Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley Reviewed by Warren Bull

Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley Reviewed by Warren Bull

There is no doubt that writers of the Golden Age of mystery writing found this novel to be remarkable. Dorothy L. Sayers said: “...a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, startlingly original.” Agatha Christie chimed in with: “One of the three best detective stories ever written.” I’d like to know what the other two best detective stories ever written were. For G.K. Chesterton, Trent’s Last Case was, in his words, “the finest detective story of modern times.”

That is a heavy burden for any book to bear. It sets the reader up to expect marvelous style, innovative plotting and a revolutionary resolution. I was frankly a bit uneasy about reading it. Tastes vary so much among people. Not long ago, one novel that won a national award, left me wondering why it even got published. Another novel, described by a friend as the best my friend had ever read, left me so bored that I quit before the midpoint of the book.

There is great. Then there is transformative. I believe Trent’s Last Case is the latter. Let me illustrate, once I heard a young man comment that he didn’t understand all the praise of the Star Wars movies. He said the robots looked silly and the special effects were commonplace. I think he was looking through the wrong end of the telescope. He was not alive when the first movie came out. He didn’t have a context for how it felt to moviegoers at the time. His frame of reference was contemporary film. All the movies he knew were influenced by the original Star Wars. He was unaware of the transformation.

Also, I once read a review by two English professors that complained Shakespeare used common images and figures of speech. That was true at the time of the review. It was not true at the time when the plays and sonnets were written. Due to its descriptive power and memorable quality, much of Shakespeare’s language has made it into common vernacular. They too were unaware of a transformation. Shakespeare had and still has a strong influence on writing.

Trent’s Last Case involves a main character that is more or less an ordinary man. He has no oracular power. He hasn’t made a study of cigar ash to the extent that he can tell Cuban tobacco ashes from Virginia tobacco ash. He has only real world skills. The main character makes mistakes like the rest of us do. He is certainly likeable. He is observant, persistent and intelligent. He is, in a word, believable, which when the novel was published, was a new approach.

To me in this day and age, the novel did not seem remarkable. It did, however, have a compelling character, actual detection, and a plot that carried me along throughout.

The novel was written in 1913. It could have been written this year. For a novel to feel contemporary more than one hundred years after it was published is quite an accomplishment. The motivations of the characters persist. Greed, pride, fear and curiosity are still part of the human experience.

I can identify parts of the novel that are more consistent with the attitudes of the early 1900s than now. Only one, a casual joke in a silly song that used a racial slur, jolted me out of reading and destroyed my suspension of disbelief that reading induces. Fortunately, the slur happens very close to the end of the book. So I read the great majority of the book first. Trent’s Last Case won high praise from some of the best mystery writers of all time. It is still highly readable with one caveat. It passes the test of time.

What books written more than a century ago read like contemporary literature to you?