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melissa_who_reads's review against another edition
4.0
Written in 1913, it's an old-fashioned mystery, but very well plotted. Things like fingerprints are brand-new to detective fiction, and not part of the standard practice of the Force. The plot has several neat twists, including right at the end after you think the mystery is solved: the final wrap-up really does solve all the inconsistencies from the earlier solution. It is a very convoluted plot, with many actors making their additions to the original plot.
It also is fairly critical of the capitalist class -- especially the American brand of capitalist, crushing labor beneath it. The murder victim is a rich American, who has crushed all in his way -- including some strike-breaking that is considered by the moral characters in the book to be beyond the pale.
Very enjoyable. It's nice to read a mystery once in a while where the bad guy is murdered, so there isn't a lot of regret over his death.
It also is fairly critical of the capitalist class -- especially the American brand of capitalist, crushing labor beneath it. The murder victim is a rich American, who has crushed all in his way -- including some strike-breaking that is considered by the moral characters in the book to be beyond the pale.
Very enjoyable. It's nice to read a mystery once in a while where the bad guy is murdered, so there isn't a lot of regret over his death.
cardica's review against another edition
4.0
To not recommend ‘the first’ Golden Age Detective Fiction novel, on a show founded upon the tenets of the era, would be sacrilege. This is Death of the Reader, and coming in at 11th place for our 2022 recommendations is E.C. Bentley’s ‘Trent’s Last Case’, also published as ‘The Woman in Black’. Released in 1913 as a response to ‘[b:The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare|184419|The Man Who Was Thursday A Nightmare|G.K. Chesterton|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403181403l/184419._SY75_.jpg|195447]’ by Bentley’s friend [a:G.K. Chesterton|7014283|G.K. Chesterton|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1365860649p2/7014283.jpg], the novel has been crowned by many with the impossible accolade of starting the Golden Age itself. To juggle the various layers of importance behind ‘Trent’s Last Case’ would, and has, been the subject of many a chapter of Golden Age Detection historiography. You’re not going to find an answer to the unanswerable question ‘was it really the first?’ here. What you will find, is where the venn diagram of ‘evidence of its pioneering’ and ‘reasons you should read it’ overlap. The book is a jovial, fondly familiar read, slightly overburdened with the technicalities that the genre’s detractors would come to bemoan. It would take you little imagination to picture how the fibres on this spinning wheel met the loom that would weave the tapestry we celebrate.
Trent’s Last Case, as seems to often be the case in crime fiction, began as a challenge for author Edmund Clerihew Bentley, to see if he could fit more flavourful characters into the burgeoning mysteries in the fashion of the late 19th century. His leading man of choice? Philip Trent, a painter whose eye for detail earned him a reputation with newspaper editor Sir James Molloy. When a famous financier is found dead in a garden shed on his own estate, Molloy wastes no time in calling the amateur sleuth onto the case. It’ll be the scoop of the year! And who better to tell the tale than the artist who would see all? Barely one chapter into the novel, and your brain is already alight with the deja-vu of a clue another author introduced to you. That feeling will be a constant as you slowly unearth how many of your favourite novels had, intentionally or not, joined their lineage to Bentley’s.
The novel is purported to have been a parody of the post-Holmes era of Detective Fiction, wherein Bentley thought the ‘realism’ of detection was too focused on the case, and not the realism of the characters. It’s not at all subtle that Trent, even whilst on the case, is flirtatious and pictures his art, admiring photographs rather than fingerprints. Many other writers may have missed the small scenes of Trent refreshing himself with a swim, eyeing local vistas, and the like, but even whilst doing so, Bentley is keenly engaged in the detectively sportsmanship Trent directly refers to when exchanging impressions with his fellow sleuths. So compelling are Bentley’s attempts to make fun of his peers, that readers supposedly often missed it was parody at all, seeing the future of the genre, before Bentley did himself.
When Trent arrives on the scene, you’re taken on a tour of the extended cast; Manderson’s internationally diverse assortment of housekeepers, as well as the amiable investigators already on the case. Curiously absent in the story is the mystery staple of suspects beyond the direct members of the household itself. The cast itself is broad by pure headcount, but many names only appear for their mandatory moment of interrogation. There are plenty of flavourful moments with Manderson’s staff, including their own attempt at a solution to the case, but despite the great one-off scenes they get, you aren’t left with a particularly strong impression of them, or the feeling that most of them matter all that much. It’s very clear who comprises the core cast, and as such if the core plot falls down for you, there’s little saving grace.
Fortunately, the core story for Trent’s is wonderful. The distrusting relationships at the heart of the story might not be the most powerful turbulent romance you’ve run into, but it is, to paraphrase [a:Martin Edwards|31252|Martin Edwards|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1535842393p2/31252.jpg], incredibly agreeable to read. The questions raised by his choice of staff and the way he treats them, compared to the muted response from Manderson’s wife, Mabel, to his death, carry just the right aura of mystery to get you through the otherwise-exhausting technicalities of timetabling and alibi for our lead suspects. Even if you aren’t one to furiously scribble down every last appointment mentioned to untangle the alibis, the motivations are discernable and cleverly conveyed. The momentum is further carried by a unique structural decision that you’ll be questioning right up until the moment it hits you.
As a modern reader, the key complaint you might have of ‘Trent’s Last Case’ is that in being a 1913 detective novel, many of the genre’s easily contemptible errors remain front and centre. Despite Bentley’s best efforts to poke fun at his predecessors, his successors were no less guilty of inhuman amateur-criminology and tenuously thin characters, and compared to more modern efforts, so too is he. Despite this, if you’ve read even the slightest slice of Golden Age Detective Fiction, you will find yourself utterly unable to not have the constant nag at the back of your head that your favourite novel might have ripped one or another detail off from this book, and there’s something awe-inspiring about that feeling.
The gatekeepers of fiction are numerous and ominous, shaping stories both by business and creative means. It’s no small feat when novels like ‘Trent’s Last Case’ barge past the gatekeepers to create new narrative niches for readers and writers alike. The shapes of those particular gates that Bentley threw open with this novel have all but crumbled into dust, but authors like [a:Dorothy L. Sayers|8734|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1519840173p2/8734.jpg] and [a:Agatha Christie|123715|Agatha Christie|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1589991473p2/123715.jpg] thanked Bentley as they walked through the rubble to the top of the world.
With those gates now gone, there’s no good reason to read Trent’s Last Case before you read any other detective fiction, however, when many mysteries later, you must inevitably come around to read it, after your curiosity has grown too large, your homework will pay off in a way few other novels can. The lines may be too blurry to ever quite pin ‘the first’ Golden Age novel, if such a thing were even worth doing, but you’ll certainly feel like it all leads back here, and that’s a feeling well worth experiencing.
Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley, also published as ‘The Woman in Black’, comes in as our 11th most-recommended novel for 2022, as a must read, but maybe not yet, for you.
Trent’s Last Case, as seems to often be the case in crime fiction, began as a challenge for author Edmund Clerihew Bentley, to see if he could fit more flavourful characters into the burgeoning mysteries in the fashion of the late 19th century. His leading man of choice? Philip Trent, a painter whose eye for detail earned him a reputation with newspaper editor Sir James Molloy. When a famous financier is found dead in a garden shed on his own estate, Molloy wastes no time in calling the amateur sleuth onto the case. It’ll be the scoop of the year! And who better to tell the tale than the artist who would see all? Barely one chapter into the novel, and your brain is already alight with the deja-vu of a clue another author introduced to you. That feeling will be a constant as you slowly unearth how many of your favourite novels had, intentionally or not, joined their lineage to Bentley’s.
The novel is purported to have been a parody of the post-Holmes era of Detective Fiction, wherein Bentley thought the ‘realism’ of detection was too focused on the case, and not the realism of the characters. It’s not at all subtle that Trent, even whilst on the case, is flirtatious and pictures his art, admiring photographs rather than fingerprints. Many other writers may have missed the small scenes of Trent refreshing himself with a swim, eyeing local vistas, and the like, but even whilst doing so, Bentley is keenly engaged in the detectively sportsmanship Trent directly refers to when exchanging impressions with his fellow sleuths. So compelling are Bentley’s attempts to make fun of his peers, that readers supposedly often missed it was parody at all, seeing the future of the genre, before Bentley did himself.
When Trent arrives on the scene, you’re taken on a tour of the extended cast; Manderson’s internationally diverse assortment of housekeepers, as well as the amiable investigators already on the case. Curiously absent in the story is the mystery staple of suspects beyond the direct members of the household itself. The cast itself is broad by pure headcount, but many names only appear for their mandatory moment of interrogation. There are plenty of flavourful moments with Manderson’s staff, including their own attempt at a solution to the case, but despite the great one-off scenes they get, you aren’t left with a particularly strong impression of them, or the feeling that most of them matter all that much. It’s very clear who comprises the core cast, and as such if the core plot falls down for you, there’s little saving grace.
Fortunately, the core story for Trent’s is wonderful. The distrusting relationships at the heart of the story might not be the most powerful turbulent romance you’ve run into, but it is, to paraphrase [a:Martin Edwards|31252|Martin Edwards|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1535842393p2/31252.jpg], incredibly agreeable to read. The questions raised by his choice of staff and the way he treats them, compared to the muted response from Manderson’s wife, Mabel, to his death, carry just the right aura of mystery to get you through the otherwise-exhausting technicalities of timetabling and alibi for our lead suspects. Even if you aren’t one to furiously scribble down every last appointment mentioned to untangle the alibis, the motivations are discernable and cleverly conveyed. The momentum is further carried by a unique structural decision that you’ll be questioning right up until the moment it hits you.
As a modern reader, the key complaint you might have of ‘Trent’s Last Case’ is that in being a 1913 detective novel, many of the genre’s easily contemptible errors remain front and centre. Despite Bentley’s best efforts to poke fun at his predecessors, his successors were no less guilty of inhuman amateur-criminology and tenuously thin characters, and compared to more modern efforts, so too is he. Despite this, if you’ve read even the slightest slice of Golden Age Detective Fiction, you will find yourself utterly unable to not have the constant nag at the back of your head that your favourite novel might have ripped one or another detail off from this book, and there’s something awe-inspiring about that feeling.
The gatekeepers of fiction are numerous and ominous, shaping stories both by business and creative means. It’s no small feat when novels like ‘Trent’s Last Case’ barge past the gatekeepers to create new narrative niches for readers and writers alike. The shapes of those particular gates that Bentley threw open with this novel have all but crumbled into dust, but authors like [a:Dorothy L. Sayers|8734|Dorothy L. Sayers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1519840173p2/8734.jpg] and [a:Agatha Christie|123715|Agatha Christie|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1589991473p2/123715.jpg] thanked Bentley as they walked through the rubble to the top of the world.
With those gates now gone, there’s no good reason to read Trent’s Last Case before you read any other detective fiction, however, when many mysteries later, you must inevitably come around to read it, after your curiosity has grown too large, your homework will pay off in a way few other novels can. The lines may be too blurry to ever quite pin ‘the first’ Golden Age novel, if such a thing were even worth doing, but you’ll certainly feel like it all leads back here, and that’s a feeling well worth experiencing.
Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley, also published as ‘The Woman in Black’, comes in as our 11th most-recommended novel for 2022, as a must read, but maybe not yet, for you.
jessica_sim's review against another edition
4.0
“Trent’s Last Case” is a good example of Golden Age Detective Fiction, better yet it apparently is one of the earliest GA detective stories. As it stands, it is a short book, and I read through it quickly. Aside from the flowery language and obviously, the period and cozy countryside it is set in, it has a very contemporary feel. Especially, where human nature and Wall Street is concerned.
The story gets more depth when you take into account that the writer wanted to create a human detective contrary to the ever popular Sherlock Holmes, and other all-knowing superhuman amateur detectives. Perhaps that's why in this book the sleuth makes some surprising discoveries and does some excellent thinking but gets it very wrong, two times.
The victim is utterly dislikeable, and at first, the reader wonders why there is a need for the victim to be so horrible that we, no one, can wait for him to be killed. Unless, of course, that serves to increase the number of possible motives and suspects in an apparently clear-cut case. That proposition takes us on a wild goose chase only to end up with the very first, very obvious, suspect encountered in the book.
I think it's an excellent mystery of the classic cut entertaining in its own right for those who enjoy a flow of humorous albeit wordy, banter.
The story gets more depth when you take into account that the writer wanted to create a human detective contrary to the ever popular Sherlock Holmes, and other all-knowing superhuman amateur detectives. Perhaps that's why in this book the sleuth makes some surprising discoveries and does some excellent thinking but gets it very wrong, two times.
The victim is utterly dislikeable, and at first, the reader wonders why there is a need for the victim to be so horrible that we, no one, can wait for him to be killed. Unless, of course, that serves to increase the number of possible motives and suspects in an apparently clear-cut case. That proposition takes us on a wild goose chase only to end up with the very first, very obvious, suspect encountered in the book.
I think it's an excellent mystery of the classic cut entertaining in its own right for those who enjoy a flow of humorous albeit wordy, banter.
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