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of his contemporaries seem excessive but the novel remains highly readable, if hardly as compelling as it was when first published, and its influence on the Golden Age is unquestionable. E. C. Bentley, who wrote the book between 1910 and 1912, was a lifelong friend and fellow journalist of G. K. Chesterton and probably wrote the novel with Chesterton’s encouragement. But what Bentley produced was hardly what his friend would have expected. Seeing himself as a modernist, Bentley disliked the conventional straitjacket of the orthodox detective story and had little respect for Sherlock Holmes. He planned a small act of sabotage, a detective story which was to satirize rather than celebrate the genre. It is ironic that although hishero, Trent, doesn’t solve the murder—nor of course did Sergeant Cuff in
The Moonstone
—Bentley is seen as an innovator, not a destroyer of the detective story.
    The victim in
Trent’s Last Case
is an American multimillionaire, an exploiter of the poor and a ruthless financial buccaneer who is found dead in the grounds of his country house with a bullet through the eye. The detective is an amateur sleuth and a painter, Philip Trent, and only at the end of the book do we know why this is his last case. The clues are fairly presented and there is at the end not one surprising disclosure, but two. The novel is unusual in that Trent falls in love with the victim’s widow, Mabel Manderson, and unlike many of the novelists of the Golden Age, Bentley was as concerned with the portrayal of character, particularly that of Manderson, as he was with providing a coherent and exciting puzzle. The dominance of the love interest was also unusual. Subsequent writers tended to agree with Dorothy L. Sayers that their detectives should concentrate their energy on clues and not on chasing attractive young women. The book is also original in that Trent’s solution to the mystery, although based on the clues available, proves erroneous. The fact that the detective herodoesn’t solve the crime, though offending against what many see as the prime unwritten rule of detective fiction, certainly makes
Trent’s Last Case
innovative.
    Writing about the novel in
Bloody Murder
, Julian Symons struggles to understand the regard in which many hold the novel, largely because of the dichotomy between the opening paragraphs, which deal with an ironic savagery with Manderson’s murder, and the change of mood in the second part. There is also an uncertainty in Bentley’s characterisation of Trent, who at times is almost a figure of fun, and yet whose love affair is treated with great seriousness and so, far from being a diversion to the detective element, is cleverly integrated with the plot. Nevertheless, instead of being later regarded as an iconoclastic or ironic novel,
Trent’s Last Case
was seen as perhaps the most significant and successful immediate precursor of the Golden Age.
    The writers of the Golden Age attracted to this fascinating form were as varied as their talents. It must at times have seemed as if everyone who could put together a coherent narrative was compelled to have a go at this challenging and lucrative craft. Many writers who made a reputation for detective fiction already had successfulcareers in other fields. Nicholas Blake, whose detective is Nigel Strangeways, was the poet Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972). Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921–1978), a musician, composer and critic. Cyril Hare was Judge Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958). Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957) wrote under his own name, as did G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) and his wife, Margaret (1893–1980), who were both economists. These novelists, already successful in other fields, produced books which have a liveliness, humour and distinction of style which places them well above what Julian Symons categorises as “the humdrums.” They seem, indeed, to have been written as much for the