Trent's Last Case

⚖The case for it

The opening is slow, no argument: the first chapters take their time, and the courtship keeps the manners of 1913. Read past that. Bentley gave his investigator permission to be jealous, to let feeling cloud his judgment, to be as human and fallible as the reader, which no detective before him was allowed to do. That flaw in the composed sleuth is what Christie and Sayers noticed and borrowed, even while Poirot and Wimsey kept their poise. Detection learns here, for the first time, how to ache.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Bentley wrote it as a joke on detective fiction, and the joke requires sitting through a lot of straight-faced Edwardian machinery first: leisurely country-house interviews, a romance with the widow conducted in drawing-room declarations, prose upholstered like the furniture. The famous final twist only lands if you cared about the puzzle first, and a century has loosened that grip.

— the honest librarian