TRENT'S LAST CASE

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A Stepping Stone for the Genre with (Too?) Much Praise:

• G. K. Chesterton called it “The finest detective story of modern times.”
• Agatha Christie: “One of the three best detective stories ever written.”
• Dorothy Sayers: “It is the one detective story of the present century which I am certain will go down to posterity as a classic. It is a masterpiece.”
• New York Times: “One of the few genuine classics of detective fiction.”

The Anti-Detective Detective – Unlike G. K. Chesterton, Bentley wasn’t a fan of detective fiction. In fact, he disliked the detective fiction of his day, which he considered formulaic and humorless. Bentley wanted to create a detective who felt like a real human being with emotions. He didn’t want to create a quirky, analytical, infallible detective like Sherlock Holmes.

In this Philip Trent mystery, we’re told Trent is a famous detective. He had a “patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of being a struggling man.” He’s a cultured, successful painter and man about town. He analyzes clues and assumes he has solved the case. He falls in love with one of the suspects. He finds out “grave things … about [Manderson’s] death, things not suspected by anyone else ….” At the end, he learns that he reached the wrong conclusion.

Rival Detectives – Trent and Inspector Murch, one of “the ablest detectives at Scotland Yard,” are both interested in “the game,” which involved “strivings for the credit of the press and of the police.”

Trent’s Pretension – Trent points to a sentence in a letter he’s writing and notes only two words of more than one syllable: “This letter is meant to impress … We must have long words.” Words such as “terminological inexactitude,” a phrase introduced by Winston Churchill used as a euphemism for a lie or a substantially correct but technically inaccurate statement. Trent also likes to toss quotes from his favorite poems into “casual” conversations. Examples:

• I am blown along a wandering wind, / And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.” – Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”
• “from childhood’s hour, / I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay;” Thomas Moore, “Lalla Rookh”
• “the dun deer’s hide / On fleeter foot was never tied.” Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake
• “drain not to its dregs the urn / Of bitter prophecy” Shelley, “Hellas”

Love at First Sight Leads to … Melodrama – “The two things that had taken [Trent] utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength and its extravagant hopelessness.”

Casual Racism – The book includes racist ramblings about Native American peoples and even a song about African American people. These ramblings made the story very hard to read at time.

Certainty of Achievement – “There are moments in life … when that which is within us … lets escape into consciousness some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well with him [and] success is at hand … The general suddenly knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of achievement.” Ever feel certain of your own achievement — a gut sense that everything’s going your way?

Fear – The “only thing that held [Trent] back was fear of an unfamiliar task. To react against fear had become a fixed moral habit with him.” Can anyone identify? Carolyn sure can.

The Modern Woman – Cupples says, “I have observed a sort of imitative hardness out of the products of the higher education of women to-day which would carry them through anything.” However, he says Mabel is different – refined, reserved, and filled with “womanly mystery.” For his part, Trent “went through life full of a strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror of certain feminine strength.” Bentley sure seems terrified of women …