Martin Edwards – Trent’s Own Case (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.’

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 Constable & Co. Ltd 1936

Copyright © Estates of E. C. Bentley & H. Warner Allen 1936

Introduction © Martin Edwards 2017

Jacket design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1925, 2017

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: 9780008216320

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008216337

Version: 2017-06-27

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

I. SOUTHWARD BOUND

II. A LITTLE SHEET OF PAPER

III. DEATH OF A PHILANTHROPIST

IV. NOT HARD OF HEARING

V. TRENT IS TAKEN ABACK

VI. AN ARREST HAS BEEN MADE

VII. ON A PLATE WITH PARSLEY ROUND IT

VIII. THE WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE

IX. THE TIARA OF MEGABYZUS

X. A MATTER OF TEMPERAMENTS

XI. IMPASSE

XII. THE COUNT EXPLAINS

XIII. FELIX POUBELLE 1884

XIV. GENIUS MUST LIVE

XV. EUNICE MAKES A CLEAN BREAST OF IT

XVI. THE WHISPERED WORD

XVII. FINE BODY OF MEN

XVIII. INFORMATION RECEIVED

XIX. RESURRECTION

XX. A GOLF MATCH

XXI. AUNT JUDITH KNITS

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

FEW detective novels published during ‘the Golden Age of Murder’ between the two world wars were as eagerly anticipated by crime fiction enthusiasts as Trent’s Own Case. The book first appeared in 1936, and within months its publishers Constable felt able to boast that it was the best crime novel of the year—quite a claim given that the competition included Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, one of the enduring classics of the genre. Yet despite its initial success, the book has long been out of print.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley’s first novel, Trent’s Last Case (known as The Woman in Black in the US) had been published almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1913. A journalist, Bentley (1875–1956) had been struck by the thought ‘that it would be a good idea to write a detective story of a new sort’. Although he admired the Sherlock Holmes stories, he was sceptical about the concept of the Great Detective, and soon ‘the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard-won and obviously correct solution of the mystery turn out to be completely wrong. Why not show up the infallibility of the Holmesian method?’ The detective who proved all too human and error-prone was Philip Trent, a gentlemanly artist with a taste for amateur sleuthing. As the title of that first book suggests, Bentley had no thought of creating what is now known as a ‘series character’.

But Fate often conspires to defeat an author’s intentions. Trent’s Last Case was so well-written, and its plot twists so appealing, that people took it at face value as a highly entertaining country house murder mystery rather than as a parody. It became a best-seller, and was filmed. The legendary thriller writer Edgar Wallace hailed the book as ‘a masterpiece’, while Dean Inge, a prominent cleric and avid crime fiction fan, said it was ‘the best detective story I ever read’. After the First World War, when ingenious mystery novels packed with suspects, clues, red herrings and twists became all the rage, Bentley’s book inspired a new generation of writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley.

When Berkeley founded the Detection Club, a social network for leading detective writers, in 1930, Bentley’s lifelong friend G.K. Chesterton became the Club’s first President and Bentley was invited to become a founder member. Although he’d shown little appetite for building on the remarkable success of his debut, younger writers whom he’d influenced held him in high regard, and possibly it was encouragement from fellow Detection Club members that then helped to persuade Bentley to revive Philip Trent in a sequel.

Trent’s Own Case was, however, a collaborative work, and the person who did most to urge Bentley to return to the fray was his co-author, Herbert Warner Allen (1881–1968), a wine expert and occasional crime writer. It seems likely that the majority of the writing was done by Bentley, although Trent was not the only recurring character. Warner Allen’s own creation, the wine merchant William Clerihew, had appeared in ‘Tokay of the Comet Year’, a short story published in 1930, and also in the book Mr Clerihew: Wine Merchant three years later. Here a champagne cork supplies a clue which is discussed between Trent and Clerihew in one of the most appealing scenes in the book. The Clerihew name was a hat-tip to Bentley, who had, long before, devised the humorous four-line verse form known as the clerihew.

Trent’s Own Case concerns Trent’s investigation into the death of a philanthropist whose generosity towards charitable causes masks a deeply unattractive personality. The story is told in a leisurely, discursive style, but the writing offers a variety of incidental pleasures, and Trent’s return to the detection game after an extended absence is deftly explained:

‘It was long enough since he had resolved to have no more to do, in a quasi-professional way, with problems of crime. But the murder of a man whom he had known, and who had aroused his interest as a human curiosity, could not be disregarded; and the utterly unexpected appearance of an old friend in the character of the self-confessed criminal had given the keenest edge to Trent’s reviving taste for that grimly fascinating business.’

Writing to ‘Jack’ Bentley (as he was known to his friends) on 17 April 1936, before the book was published, Dorothy L. Sayers was rhapsodic: ‘I was just savouring the way the story was told and submitting to the spell of beautiful writing … nothing about a book is so unmistakeable and irreplaceable as the stamp of a cultured mind … all your figures get cheerfully up and walk out of the tapestry and talk and eat and move about in three dimensions, as if it was the simplest matter in the world. It’s not, of course, but you have the enormous advantage … of knowing, in the fullest sense of the words, how to read and write.’

The book’s publication, by Constable and Company, was celebrated at a private gathering, ‘The Trent Dinner’, on 21 May 1936. Most of the guests were members of the Detection Club: Sayers, Henry Wade, Freeman Wills Crofts, Milward Kennedy and Nicholas Blake. The novelist Frank Swinnerton, who was quoted on the back cover of the dust jacket as saying that Trent’s Last Case was the finest long detective story ever written, was also present; so were the publisher Michael Sadleir and his secretary, Martha Smith. But Chesterton, whom Bentley had met when they were boys at St Paul’s School, was missing; his health had given way, and he died on 14 June.

Bentley succeeded Chesterton as President of the Detection Club and, having written a handful of short stories about Trent more than two decades earlier, produced several more, which were gathered in Trent Intervenes and published by Thomas Nelson in 1938; Constable meanwhile published Warner Allen’s new murder story The Uncounted Hour. The Second World War put an end to Trent’s career once and for all, and although Bentley published one post-war thriller, Elephant’s Work (1950), it was not a success. His health declined, and he gave up the Presidency of the Detection Club in favour of Sayers. After the war, Warner Allen became a good friend of T.S. Eliot, despite Eliot’s decision to reject one of his thrillers: ‘The plot is extremely ingenious and involved, but I think that it moves too slowly, and especially that it is very slow indeed in starting.’ In his later years, Warner Allen’s publications mostly concerned wine.