Martin Edwards: Trent’s Own Case

‘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.

The critics were kind to Trent’s Own Case . Torquemada, the Observer ’s influential crime reviewer, was lavish in his praise, as were Milward Kennedy in the Sunday Times and Anthony Berkeley (under the name Francis Iles) in the Daily Telegraph . Later, the often acerbic Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor said in A Catalogue of Crime : ‘The problem is gripping and its solution good solid work’, and reckoned that it did not fall too far short of its legendary predecessor. In time, however, a reaction set in, which perhaps explains why the book has been absent from the shelves for so long. Bentley’s son Nicolas, a distinguished artist and himself an occasional crime writer, regretted that his father had allowed Warner Allen to talk him into producing the sequel. Inevitably, the story could hardly match Trent’s Last Case for originality or impact—very few books could. However, republication in the Detective Story Club now gives twenty-first century readers a welcome chance to judge this novel on its own merits.

MARTIN EDWARDS

January 2017

‘I OUGHT to be going,’ Philip Trent said. ‘I’ve got an appointment, as I told you, and I mustn’t be late. You go on dining, Slick—have some of the crevettes Waldorf; they will bring the roses into your cheeks. If I come round with the car tomorrow about ten, will you be more or less ready?’

‘Less, I expect,’ Slick Patmore grumbled. ‘That is, if this ghastly weather doesn’t change in the night. A two-hours’ run through drizzle and chill is not my idea of a morning’s pleasure.’

‘It’s bound to change in the night,’ Trent assured him. ‘The only question is how many times it will change. That’s the exciting thing about a variable climate like ours; and it is at its best in April, as everybody knows. Oh to be in England, now that April’s there, and whoever wakes in England is entirely unaware whether it is going to rain cats and dogs or be gay with sunshine, birds and blossoms. Besides, it isn’t a question of pleasure for you and me tomorrow. It is duty, Slick, duty whose stern behest impels us to the deed of going to see Julian Pickett married.’

‘And drink his health in what old Blinky Fisher imagines to be champagne,’ Patmore added, moodily helping himself to another glass of La Tour–Figeac.

‘Why shouldn’t he have an imagination, just because he is a Canon of Glasminster?’ Trent asked. ‘He’ll need it, I should say, when he gives away his niece to Julian, and has to pretend that he has some sort of responsibility for a girl of the present time. Ha! I can see it now. “Who giveth this woman?” Come on, Blinky; to what green altar, O mysterious priest, lead’st thou that heifer? Probably he will have mislaid his spectacles, and will try to give Julian away.’

‘Didn’t you say you had an appointment?’ Patmore hinted.

Trent, descending the staircase of the Cactus Club, stood in the doorway and lighted a cigarette as he nerved himself to the task of going to see his favourite aunt off on the boat-train to Newhaven. It is a part of our island heritage, he mused, that at such times as we are on the point of leaving the country the weather is usually pretty beastly. As God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, so the Briton about to uproot himself from the native soil is upheld and solaced by the thought that the climate he is going to cannot possibly be so objectionable. An erroneous thought, perhaps; but what thoughts (he asked himself) are not so? This particular evening, at least, was quite noxious enough to warrant the rosiest anticipations of what it was going to be like anywhere across the Channel. Fortunate indeed was Aunt Judith!