Trent’s Last Case

‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Thomas Nelson and Sons 1913

Copyright © Estate of E. C. Bentley 1913

Introduction © John Curran 2017

Afterword © Estate of Dorothy L. Sayers 1978

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1913, 2020

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008216269

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008216276

Version: 2020-06-24

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Dedication

I. BAD NEWS

II. KNOCKING THE TOWN ENDWAYS

III. BREAKFAST

IV. HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR

V. POKING ABOUT

VI. MR BUNNER ON THE CASE

VII. THE LADY IN BLACK

VIII. THE INQUEST

IX. A HOT SCENT

X. THE WIFE OF DIVES

XI. HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED

XII. EVIL DAYS

XIII. ERUPTION

XIV. WRITING A LETTER

XV. DOUBLE CUNNING

XVI. THE LAST STRAW

Afterword

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

‘SOME time in the year 1910 it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to write a detective story of a new sort …’

Thus begins E. C. Bentley’s discussion of his famous novel, Trent’s Last Case. In his 1940 autobiography, Those Days, he devotes an entire chapter to the genesis of what has become one of the most famous milestones in the genre. He continues:

‘It should be possible I thought, to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as a human being … It was not until I had gone a long way with the plot that the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution to the mystery turn out to be completely wrong … In the result, it does not seem to have been generally noticed that Trent’s Last Case is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.’

In the year 1910 the market for detective short stories was thriving. Sherlock Holmes had dominated for the previous two decades since his first Strand appearance, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (1891). R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke, one of the earliest, and certainly the most persuasive, of the forensic detectives—Freeman was a medical doctor—had been investigating in both short story and novel since 1907 and, as Bentley was considering his contribution to the genre, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud were embarking on their crime-solving careers. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard and Victor L. Whitechurch’s Thorpe Hazell in Thrilling Stories of the Railway were also among the dozens of detectives—most of them now long forgotten—appearing regularly in the popular magazines. The stage was set for a ‘detective story of a new sort’…

Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born in London in 1875; he won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford and it was while studying Law in London that he began writing for various newspapers and magazines including, for ten years, the Daily News. Although called to the Bar in 1902, most of his working life was spent at the Daily Telegraph, beginning in 1912; although he ‘retired’ from journalism in 1934, with the outbreak of WWII and the call-up of younger men, he returned as literary critic in 1939, eventually leaving in 1947.

More whimsically, Bentley was also the originator of the four-line metrically-irregular verse that became known as the ‘Clerihew’. The earliest example dates from 1905:

‘Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.’

He made the acquaintance of G. K. Chesterton while at school and they remained lifelong friends; both were journalists and poets, novelists and short story writers; and, perhaps not surprisingly, their approach to detective fiction, each eschewing the idea of a Great Detective, was also similar. Later in their lives, both also were destined to be President of the Detection Club; Chesterton was its first President and, after his death in 1936, Bentley assumed the Presidential Robes—literally and figuratively—for the next thirteen years. While Bentley, in Those Days, refutes the story that Chesterton had wagered him that he couldn’t write a detective story, he does admit that ‘[Chesterton] urged me to write a story of that sort’; and acknowledges this in an affectionate dedication.

Although he had never written a novel, Bentley felt that ‘It should be possible to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as a human being and was not so much the “heavy” sleuth.’ He tried, in his creation of a detective character, to get as far away from Holmes, the ‘Great Detective’, as possible. So, as he explained in a 1935 essay, Philip Trent:

‘… does not take himself at all seriously. He is not a scientific expert; he is not a professional crime investigator. He is an artist … who has strayed accidentally into the business of crime journalism because he found he had an aptitude for it, and without any sense of having a mission. He is not superior to the feelings of average humanity … he even goes so far as to fall in love. He does not regard the Scotland Yard men as bungling half-wits, but has the highest respect for their trained abilities. All very unlike Holmes.’

He planned the novel over a period of six to eight weeks, much of it while walking from his home in Hampstead to the offices of the Daily News; in fact, most of Trent’s Last Case’s creation was done on Bentley’s feet—either walking or writing at his ‘standing-up desk’ in his Fleet Street office. And like—one hopes!—most writers of detective fiction, he began by drafting the last chapter. The eponymous detective was originally called Philip Gasket but this was amended to the monosyllabic ‘Trent’ when the novel appeared in the US, in March 1913 as The Woman in Black (Chapter VII is ‘The Lady in Black’), a title it retained in America for the next eighteen years.

Another famous crime writer, John Buchan, was responsible for the UK publication. Buchan, whose archetypal The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is as celebrated and influential in the thriller genre as Bentley’s book is in the detective genre, was a partner in the British publishing firm, Nelson’s. Both men knew each other from their Oxford days and, when Bentley sought his advice, Buchan was so impressed by the manuscript that he immediately made an offer to publish it. When it appeared, also in March 1913, Nelson’s retained the US amendment to the detective’s name, but restored Bentley’s original title.

In planning the novel Bentley had listed some characters and situations then—and for many years following—considered necessary in a detective story: a murdered millionaire, his widow, her maid, a male secretary, a butler, a gifted amateur detective, a not-too-gifted policeman and a ‘perfect’ alibi; and they all duly appear. But in demonstrating his detective’s susceptibility to ‘the feelings of average humanity’, Bentley, very daringly, has him fall in love with one of the chief suspects. Will this cloud Trent’s deductive abilities? Will it, perhaps, prejudice his dedication to justice? Will it influence his solution?

And while Trent, and the reader, grapple with these conundrums, Bentley slyly detonates a plotting landmine … an even more ground-breaking innovation which immediately qualified Trent’s Last Case for a permanent place on the shelf of The Great Detective Novels. However, as Bentley pointed out: ‘… it does not seem to have been noticed that [the novel] is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.’ (All will become clear after you’ve read the novel.)

Chesterton considered Trent’s Last Case ‘… a real detective story that is also a real book’, while Dorothy L. Sayers, in an introduction to a reprint of the novel, asserted that ‘every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence’. Howard Haycraft, author of Murder For Pleasure (1945), the ground-breaking history of detective fiction, credited the novel ‘with changing the whole course of [detective fiction]’. Two later commentators, Leroy Lad Panek, in his 1979 Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Story in Britain 1914-1939, thought it ‘the bible of the detective-writer’s craft’; and Eric Routley dubbed it simply, in his The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story (1972) ‘the first great detective novel’.

More than twenty years after Trent’s debut Bentley wrote, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, Trent’s Own Case (1936) and, alone, a collection of much-anthologised short stories, Trent Intervenes (1938). He contributed to the early collaborative efforts of the Detection Club, Behind the Screen and The Scoop in 1930 and 1931; and in 1938 edited an impressive anthology, The Second Century of Detective Stories. A final novel, the disappointing thriller Elephant’s Work, followed in 1950. But his reputation as a detective story writer rests almost entirely on his first detective novel. He died in London in March 1956.

Trent’s Last Case was filmed in 1920 in a silent version and again in 1929, an adaptation released in both silent and sound versions—both ‘bad beyond description’ according to Bentley—and then in 1952 with Orson Welles, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Wilding.

As one of the earliest defining detective novels of the twentieth century, all detective fiction (as well as ‘every detective writer’) owes a debt to Trent’s Last Case. It established the detective novel, rather than the short story, as the new field of play for writer and reader in which the next refinements in the genre were to occur. Bentley’s experimentation—with a detective who, unlike predecessors, is a fallible human being—within a cleverly constructed plot, culminating in a surprise solution, prepared readers for the advent of an era in which they would learn to expect the unexpected. Trent’s Last Case heralded, in fact, detective fiction’s Golden Age.

DR JOHN CURRAN

November 2016

TO

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I dedicate this story to you. First: because the only really noble motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it. Second: because I owe you a book in return for The Man Who Was Thursday. Third: because I said I would when I unfolded the plan of it to you, surrounded by Frenchmen, two years ago. Fourth: because I remember the past.

I have been thinking again today of those astonishing times when neither of us ever looked at a newspaper; when we were purely happy in the boundless consumption of paper, pencils, tea and our elders’ patience; when we embraced the most severe literature, and ourselves produced such light reading as was necessary; when (in the words of Canada’s poet) we studied the works of nature, also those little frogs; when, in short, we were extremely young.

For the sake of that age I offer you this book.

Yours always,

E. C. BENTLEY

‘… So shall you hear

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc’d cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on the inventors’ heads …’

HAMLET

CHAPTER I

BAD NEWS

BETWEEN what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?

When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honour. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth too shuddered under a blow.

In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions for their labour, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson there had been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, a thing especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remained incongruously about his head through the years when he stood in every eye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out of manipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest the borders of Wall Street.

The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of those chieftains on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to him with accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietly continued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, who had at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand, should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which is steadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so. While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a rich man’s proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him an instinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does not shriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on to him nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, his forbear. During that first period of his business career which had been called his early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler of genius, his hand against every man’s—an infant prodigy—who brought to the enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed than any opposed to it. At St Helena it was laid down that war is une belle occupation; and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous and complicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.

Then came his change. At his father’s death, when Manderson was thirty years old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the god he served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elastic adaptability of his nation he turned to steady labour in his father’s banking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of the Street. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the great firm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety, and financial weight lifted it like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust founded on the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly a different man. How the change came about none could with authority say, but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whom alone he had respected and perhaps loved.

He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was current in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson called up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast wealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital, drew together and centralised industries of continental scope, financed with unerring judgement the large designs of state or of private enterprise. Many a time when he ‘took hold’ to smash a strike, or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, he sent ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends. Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.

But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out, the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in his hatband. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuous raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of the offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go soberly down to his counting-house—humming a stave or two of ‘Spanish Ladies’, perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself the harmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, of pointing out to some Rupert of the markets a coup worth a million to the depredator might have been made. ‘Seems to me,’ he would say almost wistfully, ‘the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since I quit.’ By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus became known to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.

At the news of his death panic went through the markets like a hurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashed like towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorous inferno of pale despair. All over the United States, wherever speculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide. In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had become pitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them had never seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from the Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it as the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.

The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed ‘scare’—suppressed, because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time when the market had been ‘boosted’ beyond its real strength. In the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements which had been expected to be much better than they were. But at whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the threatened break had been felt, ‘the Manderson crowd’ had stepped in and held the market up. All through the week the speculator’s mind, as shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in this the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar. Manderson, said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication with his lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give in round figures the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone in the past twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert operators had been sent down by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone to deal with the flood of messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on the first news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday and return home by the Lusitania; but that he soon had the situation so well in hand that he had determined to remain where he was.

All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the ‘finance editors’, consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship—knew also that no word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organiser of victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days, and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the feet of Mr Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Etna-mutterings of disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm, and slowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out but thankfully at peace.

In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumour flew round the sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning comes—a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone—together with an urgent selling order by some employee in the cable service. A sharp spasm convulsed the convalescent share-list. In five minutes the dull noise of the kerbstone market in Broad Street had leapt to a high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous ‘short’ interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of ‘Yankees’ in London at the close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four hours’ trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as the saviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors with annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone, listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding of Manderson’s body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide, was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.