Hachette India

The Complete Trent Case Book (3-books-in-1)

E.C. Bentley

"The finest detective story of modern times" G.K. Chesterton

Trent's Last Case (aka The Woman in Black) has attained cult status as being the first book to almost spoof the genre it exists in. Bentley wrote it "to show up the infallibility of the Holmesian method" where the detective can get it completely wrong.

Sigsbee Manderson an American tycoon is found dead at his English country house. Artist and amateur detective Philip Trent arrives to find that there is more to the case than the solving of puzzles like: why was Manderson not wearing his false teeth? Why is his young widow so relieved at his death? But he must also accept his own fallibility, in detection and in love.

"One of the three best detective stories ever written" Agatha Christie

"It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution ...Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence." Dorothy L. Sayers

Trent's Own Case (co-written with H. Warner Allen) James Randolph is murdered his safe ransacked, and there's wrapping paper strewn around his bedroom floor. Trent seems to have been the last person, to see the victim alive and to complicate matters a friend of Trent's admits to the crime. Trent must find the truth.

Trent Intervenes has a full dozen stories ranging from fraud and embezzlement to criminal assault and murder, that Trent must solve.

E.C. Bentley

Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who generally published under the names E.C. Bentley or E. Clerihew Bentley, was a popular English novelist and humourist, and inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. His best known one is

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, "I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls

Say I am designing St. Paul's".

Bentley's detective novel Trent's Last Case was much praised, (see back cover) and with its labyrinthine and mystifying plotting can be seen as the first truly modern mystery. It was adapted as a film in 1920, 1929, and 1952. The success of the work inspired him, after 23 years, to cowrite a sequel, Trent's Own Case (1936). There was also a book of Trent short stories, Trent Intervenes (1938).

From 1936 until 1949 Bentley was president of the Detection Club. He contributed to two crime stories for the club's radio serials broadcast in 1930 and 1931, which were published in 1983 as The Scoop and Behind The Screen. In 1950 he contributed the introduction to a Constable & Co. omnibus edition of Damon Runyon's "stories of the bandits of Broadway", which was republished in 1990 as On Broadway.

He died in 1956 in London at the age of 80. His son Nicolas Bentley was an illustrator.

G.K. Chesterton dedicated his popular detective novel on anarchist terrorism, The Man Who Was Thursday, to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a school friend.