E. Bentley – Trent Intervenes (страница 1)
‘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.’
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First published in Great Britain by Thomas Nelson and Sons 1938
‘Meet Trent’ first published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1935
‘The Ministering Angel’ first published in
Introduction first published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1953
Copyright © Estate of E. C. Bentley 1935, 1938
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Source ISBN: 9780008216290
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008216306
Version: 2017-06-27
Contents
VI. TRENT AND THE FOOL-PROOF LIFT
A LITTLE more than four decades ago, in the dear, dead year of 1910, when world wars were still unknown and the Edwardian age was dying with its king, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a journalist on the staff of London’s
Conan Doyle, the old master, was still very much alive as a man, with twenty years to go; but, although he was to produce three more volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, he was pretty well done as a writer, and his imitators, who came swarming into print after 1891, had proved themselves far better able to copy the master’s faults than to match his virtues. Hence E. C. Bentley’s disgust. Hence his determination to do something about it.
Others, indeed, were already doing something in their several ways. R. Austin Freeman’s detective, Dr John Thorndyke, making his debut in
But Bentley had ideas of his own. He wished to write a full-length detective novel in which the protagonist would be ‘recognizable as a human being’. He wished also to get away from the solemnity that would have made Holmes himself insufferable, had it not been for his creator’s ingenuity, and that did make insufferable the imitations of Holmes. After all, why shouldn’t a fictional detective have his lighter side? ‘Even Mr Gladstone,’ the Fleet Street journalist reminded himself, ‘had manifested, at rare intervals, something that could only be described as a sense of humour.’
Bentley knew what he wanted to do, but he wondered if he could do it. He was a writer who had reached the age of thirty-five without writing a single narrative longer than a short sketch. He had written much light verse for
Sir Humphry Davy
Detested gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
This, then, was the sum of Bentley’s literary achievement when he was making what proved to be one of the major decisions of his life—the decision to write a detective novel, at a time when such books were not being written, as they were soon to be—according to his own auctorial catalogue—by ‘University professors, poets, critics, playwrights, ecclesiastics and non-detective novelists of the first rank’. Had he chosen to sum up his other qualifications and background for the task ahead, he might have done so briefly as follows.
He was an English gentleman, born on July 10, 1875, in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, he had captained his College boat club at Oxford, gone in for literature, and been president of the Oxford Union in 1898. A year later, while reading in barrister’s chambers, he had begun to write regularly for the
It was his long daily walks between his house in Hampstead and his office in Fleet Street that gave him the leisure to work out his plot. ‘But no writing was done,’ he informs us, ‘until I had the first skeleton complete in detail; and that must have taken a long time—it may have been six or eight weeks. I made notes, however. One day I drew up a list of the things absolutely necessary to an up-to-date detective story: a millionaire—murdered, of course; a police detective who fails where the gifted amateur succeeds; an apparently perfect alibi; some fussing about in a motor car or cars, with at least one incident in which the law of the land and the safety of human life were treated as entirely negligible by the quite sympathetic character at the driving-wheel … Besides these indispensables there had, of course, to be a crew of regulation suspects, to include the victim’s widow, his secretary, his wife’s maid, his butler, and a person who had quarrelled openly with him. I decided, too, that there had better be a love-interest, because there was supposed to be a demand for this in a full-length novel. I made this decision with reluctance, because to me love-interest in novels of plot was very tiresome.’