When one scans this list of ‘indispensables’ one realizes that John Carter was speaking without exaggeration and with perfect justice when he described Edmund Clerihew Bentley as ‘the father of the contemporary detective novel’. To count the number of times that his chosen elements have been manipulated by his successors would require the best efforts, for at least a minute, of the latest mechanical monster produced by the new and terrifying science of cybernetics. But Bentley’s most original contribution to the detective story is one that will not be mentioned here; for mere mention of it would be unfair to those who have not read Trent’s Last Case. At the proper moment, and not an instant sooner, they will discover this contribution for themselves.
With his plot complete, the novice novelist sat down to the business of putting verbal flesh, and some decorative clothing, on his skeleton. But he did not yet realize that he was writing Trent’s Last Case. He was, he believed, writing Philip Gasket’s Last Case; and when we compare the attractiveness of these two titles we are moved to consider anew the validity of the old saw about a rose by any other name.
Bentley was also writing with one eye firmly fixed on a prize of fifty pounds that was being offered for the copyright of the winning novel in a competition sponsored by Duckworth, the London publisher. After about six months the manuscript was ready. Off it went to compete for the vast sum, and the author sat back to wait. But fortunately, while he was waiting, in January, 1912, he found himself fatefully seated at dinner beside Mr Henry Z. Doty of the Century Company, New York City. Now it is common knowledge that when an author and a publisher are gathered together it takes the latter a little less than a split second to discover whether or not the former has any available and attractive merchandise for sale; and so it was in this instance. Mr Bentley innocently confided to Mr Doty his hopes regarding the fifty pounds, and Mr Doty sniffed at mention of so inadequate, so un-American a figure. To sell the copyright of a promising book for any such amount would be an act of folly. The thing for Mr Bentley to do was to let Mr Doty see the manuscript, let him take it aboard ship with him. Then, if the book was half the book it sounded, business could be done on the proper level.
What author would have resisted? Having learned through a private grapevine that Philip Gasket’s Last Case had no chance of winning the prize, Bentley withdrew it from the competition and gave it to the American publisher. A few weeks later he received a cablegram that offered him a five hundred dollar advance against royalties. But Century wished to change the names of both hero and title. Philip Gasket promptly became Philip Trent. As for the second change, Bentley has recorded his opinion of it. ‘I wrote to them that they could call it what they liked if they didn’t like my title; so they called it The Woman in Black; which I thought a silly name. I am glad to say that when Alfred Knopf took over the American rights eighteen years later he issued the book under its proper title.’ All of us, I think, can share Bentley’s gladness.
The book that was to endure as Trent’s Last Case was published in the United States and in England, under equally favourable terms, in March 1913. Swedish, Danish, Italian, and French versions quickly followed. After these came German, Polish, and Jugoslav translations. A refugee Russian edition was issued in Berlin, and the book was put into Gaelic for such honest Irishmen as were bravely attempting to turn back the linguistic clock.
Philip Trent was a huge success, and it was obvious that neither public nor publishers would be satisfied to have his last case his one and only case. But, if his creator yielded to popular demand, he did so sparingly. Another author might have settled down to live off Trent for the rest of both their lives, but E. C. Bentley, Liberal journalist of Fleet Street, chose to expend the best part of his energies in giving readers of the Daily Telegraph the benefit of his knowledge of foreign affairs, and other matters, through the vigorous, characteristic leaders that he contributed to that journal for twenty-two years.
However he was not entirely hard-hearted towards Trent’s admirers. As time went by he consented to write a dozen short stories in which the genial, loquacious painter exercised his highly original powers of detection; and he also consented to write one more Trent novel, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, who was interestingly enough author of a book named Mr Clerihew: Wine Merchant. The short stories were collected and published, in 1938, under the title of Trent Intervenes.fn1 The novel, Trent’s Own Case, appeared in 1936.
It would be pointless for me to add my mite to the mountain of praise that has been heaped on Trent’s Last Case—a book that Dorothy Sayers has roundly declared to be the one detective novel of its era that is sure to endure—but Trent’s Last Case and Trent’s Own Case are alike in that they both get better and better as they proceed. They are also alike in that they are the work of a writer who believed that in detective fiction the solution is not all, that it is the author’s duty to provide entertainment along the way—as great a variety of entertainment, verbal and otherwise, as possible. In the second novel, for example, we are entertained in diverse fashions by Trent’s journey to Dieppe and the strange story of the Count d’Astalys and the Pavillon de l’Ecstase, by the remarkable tale of the Tiara of Megabyzus, and by the search for a bottle of Felix Poubelle 1884 and the authoritative remarks of ‘William Clerihew, the renowned and erudite wine-merchant of Fountain Court’. But the patterns of the two books are quite different. Trent’s Last Case is a beautiful example of the false-bottomed chest; and it is something even better, for once the false bottom has been revealed there is, still, a final, secret compartment to be discovered. (Perhaps at this point, without giving anything away, I may quote Bentley’s own remark that ‘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’.) Trent’s Own Case, on the other hand, is a fine example of an expanding, divaricating narrative—it is, we may say not too fancifully, a veritable tree of a mystery that is, as we read, constantly putting out new branches before our eyes.
In the short stories both author and detective are in their most light-hearted mood and most ingenious vein. Indeed, in one or two instances, readers who are unwilling or unable to follow Coleridge’s famous advice, by momentarily engaging in ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, may feel that both author and detective are too ingenious and too light-hearted in their cavalier disregard of plausibility. But one should, I think, bear in mind while reading the short stories that Bentley was by nature a humorist with a strong liking for the preposterous. One might remember, too, that he was a close friend of Chesterton, and read his tales with the idea that he may well have been tempted to make some of Trent’s exploits rival Father Brown’s most fantastic triumphs in the realms of improbability. However, I am sure that even his most captious reader will have to admit that in the field of the detective short story, as in that of the detective novel, Bentley has produced at least one masterpiece. ‘The Genuine Tabard’ will take a lot of beating.
Here then is a body of writing that is not only enjoyable for its own sake but important in literary history. Edmund Clerihew Bentley—whose last book was a ‘shocker’ called Elephant’s Work, published in 1950—bears a heavy responsibility for the course taken by the detective story during what has surely proved its period of greatest glory. It is hardly necessary to add that he bears no responsibility at all for the moronic mixture of sex and sadism that is now masquerading under the ancient and honorable name of detective fiction. Readers who are looking for that kind of thing must go to another shop.
BEN RAY REDMAN
1953
PREFACE
MEET TRENT
I FEEL a little embarrassment in writing about the character of Philip Trent, because the poor fellow has made his appearance in only one single book. But it is a book which, I am glad to say, has had an extensive sale for many years past. I don’t say this out of boastfulness at all, but simply because it is my only excuse for holding forth on this occasion. The story called Trent’s Last Case was published in 1913. That is a long time ago. It takes us back to a day when the detective story was a very different thing from what it is now. I am not sure why Sherlock Holmes and his earlier imitators could never be at all amusing or light-hearted; but it may have been because they felt that they had a mission, and had to sustain a position of superiority to the ordinary run of mankind. Trent does not feel about himself in that way at all, as a short passage of dialogue from the book may indicate. The story is concerned with the murdering of a millionaire at his country place in Devonshire—one of the earliest of a long, long line of murdered millionaires. Trent makes his appearance at a country hotel near the scene of the crime; and there, to his surprise, he finds an old gentleman whom he knows well—Mr Cupples his name is—just finishing an open-air breakfast on the verandah. Trent gets out of his car and comes up the steps.
