Trent's Last Case

⚖The case for it

Bentley wrote this impatient with the infallible sleuths crowding the shelves in 1913, and Trent is what he put up instead: an artist and journalist who works the case through his press access, “engaging, very human and prone to quoting poetry.” The plotting is dense enough that readers call it one of the “most complicated plots ever put down in writing,” assembled and reassembled out of physical evidence. The structural surprises still land a century on. Sayers credited it with reshaping the genre, and one critic notes that “it shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The first third moves slowly enough that readers report skipping whole chapters. Once the romance takes over, Trent stops observing and “becomes a love struck ninny,” while the widow drops from an intriguing figure to “another sickening heroine.” The prose is “quite uneven, as if the author were trying on the styles” rather than settling into one. The “casual sexism and minor racism and antisemitism expressed” throughout is a real cost rather than a footnote. And what struck 1913 as fresh reads as quaint rather than sharp now, leaving the book “a curiosity at best.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings