Best 1913 Adventures (4)

By: Joshua Glenn
February 21, 2018

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1913 adventure novels. Happy 105th anniversary!

E.C. Bentley’s crime adventure Trent’s Last Case.

The American mogul Sigsbee Manderson is found dead, at his British estate, under mysterious circumstances (e.g., bruises on his wrist); was he killed or did he commit suicide? Paging Philip Trent, portrait artist and gentleman detective, whose painterly eye has in the past allowed him to draw helpful conclusions about crime scenes. In this early example of a “cozy mystery” — an un-hardboiled Golden Age of Detective Fiction sub-genre in which the crime takes place in a socially intimate community, and in which sex and violence are treated with Wodehouse-esque irreverence — Trent sleuths and reasons his way to a compelling solution fairly quickly. But there are reversals, even double reversals, to come before it’s all over. It’s an uneven effort, but fun. The newly widowed Mabel Manderson is a particularly compelling femme fatale; and Trent is a proto-Lord Peter Wimsey type, full of high spirits and literary allusions.

Fun facts: E.C. Bentley was a journalist who set out to poke fun at the humorless Sherlock Holmes (new Holmes stories were still being published, at the time). In doing so, he kick-started an entire sub-genre. Dorothy Sayers was a fan; the hardboiled Raymond Chandler was not. Sequels: Trent’s Own Case (1936) and the short-story collection Trent Intervenes (1938).

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Best 1913 Adventures (4)

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