Trent Intervenes

But Bentley had ideas of his own. He wished to write a full-length detective novel in which the protagonist would be ‘recognizable as a human being’. He wished also to get away from the solemnity that would have made Holmes himself insufferable, had it not been for his creator’s ingenuity, and that did make insufferable the imitations of Holmes. After all, why shouldn’t a fictional detective have his lighter side? ‘Even Mr Gladstone,’ the Fleet Street journalist reminded himself, ‘had manifested, at rare intervals, something that could only be described as a sense of humour.’

Bentley knew what he wanted to do, but he wondered if he could do it. He was a writer who had reached the age of thirty-five without writing a single narrative longer than a short sketch. He had written much light verse for Punch. He had written ballades, and had helped to establish a vogue for the verse form that Austin Dobson, years earlier, had managed so perfectly. He had written numberless leaders and middles and fillers for the Speaker and the News. In the latter periodical he was now proving himself a pioneer by writing a something that was as yet nameless—a something that some day, soon, would be known as a ‘column’. Under the name of E. Clerihew he had written a little book called Biography for Beginners (1905), illustrated by Chesterton, and composed of delightful, irregular quatrains that nonsensically celebrated famous lives and deeds with a wit that caused all such quatrains to be referred to thenceforward as ‘clerihews’. A fair specimen of the genre is one of the first that popped into Bentley’s head.

Sir Humphry Davy

Detested gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.

This, then, was the sum of Bentley’s literary achievement when he was making what proved to be one of the major decisions of his life—the decision to write a detective novel, at a time when such books were not being written, as they were soon to be—according to his own auctorial catalogue—by ‘University professors, poets, critics, playwrights, ecclesiastics and non-detective novelists of the first rank’. Had he chosen to sum up his other qualifications and background for the task ahead, he might have done so briefly as follows.

He was an English gentleman, born on July 10, 1875, in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, he had captained his College boat club at Oxford, gone in for literature, and been president of the Oxford Union in 1898. A year later, while reading in barrister’s chambers, he had begun to write regularly for the Speaker, a Liberal weekly that was to become the Nation, where his fellow contributors included Barrie, Chesterton and Belloc. Shortly after being called to the Bar, in 1901, he had abandoned the law for a permanent place on the staff of the Daily News, where he was to remain until he removed himself to the staff of the Daily Telegraph, in 1912. On the News—owned by George Cadbury, the famous millionaire, chocolate-making, Quaker philanthropist—Bentley found himself part of a team composed of the most distinguished Liberal journalists of the day; a team that played an active part in the fights to strip power from the House of Lords and to give Home Rule to Ireland. (Readers who are about to meet the estimable Inspector Murch of Trent’s Last Case, may be interested to learn that the head of the composing room of the Daily News was a paragon named Murch, ‘one of the best and most imperturbably efficient of men’.) In 1902 Bentley had married Violet Boileau, daughter of General N. E. Boileau, Bengal Staff Corps, and had become the father of two sons. So, when he thought of improving the state of the detective story he was also thinking, like many a writer before him, of improving his family’s fortunes. But if he were to succeed in this enterprise, he told himself, he must build on a sound foundation. In his volume of reminiscences, Those Days (1940), he tells us how he built.

It was his long daily walks between his house in Hampstead and his office in Fleet Street that gave him the leisure to work out his plot. ‘But no writing was done,’ he informs us, ‘until I had the first skeleton complete in detail; and that must have taken a long time—it may have been six or eight weeks. I made notes, however. One day I drew up a list of the things absolutely necessary to an up-to-date detective story: a millionaire—murdered, of course; a police detective who fails where the gifted amateur succeeds; an apparently perfect alibi; some fussing about in a motor car or cars, with at least one incident in which the law of the land and the safety of human life were treated as entirely negligible by the quite sympathetic character at the driving-wheel … Besides these indispensables there had, of course, to be a crew of regulation suspects, to include the victim’s widow, his secretary, his wife’s maid, his butler, and a person who had quarrelled openly with him. I decided, too, that there had better be a love-interest, because there was supposed to be a demand for this in a full-length novel. I made this decision with reluctance, because to me love-interest in novels of plot was very tiresome.’

When one scans this list of ‘indispensables’ one realizes that John Carter was speaking without exaggeration and with perfect justice when he described Edmund Clerihew Bentley as ‘the father of the contemporary detective novel’. To count the number of times that his chosen elements have been manipulated by his successors would require the best efforts, for at least a minute, of the latest mechanical monster produced by the new and terrifying science of cybernetics. But Bentley’s most original contribution to the detective story is one that will not be mentioned here; for mere mention of it would be unfair to those who have not read Trent’s Last Case. At the proper moment, and not an instant sooner, they will discover this contribution for themselves.

With his plot complete, the novice novelist sat down to the business of putting verbal flesh, and some decorative clothing, on his skeleton. But he did not yet realize that he was writing Trent’s Last Case. He was, he believed, writing Philip Gasket’s Last Case; and when we compare the attractiveness of these two titles we are moved to consider anew the validity of the old saw about a rose by any other name.

Bentley was also writing with one eye firmly fixed on a prize of fifty pounds that was being offered for the copyright of the winning novel in a competition sponsored by Duckworth, the London publisher. After about six months the manuscript was ready. Off it went to compete for the vast sum, and the author sat back to wait. But fortunately, while he was waiting, in January, 1912, he found himself fatefully seated at dinner beside Mr Henry Z. Doty of the Century Company, New York City. Now it is common knowledge that when an author and a publisher are gathered together it takes the latter a little less than a split second to discover whether or not the former has any available and attractive merchandise for sale; and so it was in this instance. Mr Bentley innocently confided to Mr Doty his hopes regarding the fifty pounds, and Mr Doty sniffed at mention of so inadequate, so un-American a figure. To sell the copyright of a promising book for any such amount would be an act of folly. The thing for Mr Bentley to do was to let Mr Doty see the manuscript, let him take it aboard ship with him. Then, if the book was half the book it sounded, business could be done on the proper level.

What author would have resisted? Having learned through a private grapevine that Philip Gasket’s Last Case had no chance of winning the prize, Bentley withdrew it from the competition and gave it to the American publisher. A few weeks later he received a cablegram that offered him a five hundred dollar advance against royalties. But Century wished to change the names of both hero and title. Philip Gasket promptly became Philip Trent. As for the second change, Bentley has recorded his opinion of it. ‘I wrote to them that they could call it what they liked if they didn’t like my title; so they called it The Woman in Black; which I thought a silly name. I am glad to say that when Alfred Knopf took over the American rights eighteen years later he issued the book under its proper title.’ All of us, I think, can share Bentley’s gladness.

The book that was to endure as Trent’s Last Case was published in the United States and in England, under equally favourable terms, in March 1913. Swedish, Danish, Italian, and French versions quickly followed. After these came German, Polish, and Jugoslav translations. A refugee Russian edition was issued in Berlin, and the book was put into Gaelic for such honest Irishmen as were bravely attempting to turn back the linguistic clock.

Philip Trent was a huge success, and it was obvious that neither public nor publishers would be satisfied to have his last case his one and only case. But, if his creator yielded to popular demand, he did so sparingly. Another author might have settled down to live off Trent for the rest of both their lives, but E. C. Bentley, Liberal journalist of Fleet Street, chose to expend the best part of his energies in giving readers of the Daily Telegraph the benefit of his knowledge of foreign affairs, and other matters, through the vigorous, characteristic leaders that he contributed to that journal for twenty-two years.

However he was not entirely hard-hearted towards Trent’s admirers. As time went by he consented to write a dozen short stories in which the genial, loquacious painter exercised his highly original powers of detection; and he also consented to write one more Trent novel, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, who was interestingly enough author of a book named Mr Clerihew: Wine Merchant. The short stories were collected and published, in 1938, under the title of Trent Intervenes.

The novel, Trent’s Own Case, appeared in 1936.

It would be pointless for me to add my mite to the mountain of praise that has been heaped on Trent’s Last Case—a book that Dorothy Sayers has roundly declared to be the one detective novel of its era that is sure to endure—but Trent’s Last Case and Trent’s Own Case are alike in that they both get better and better as they proceed. They are also alike in that they are the work of a writer who believed that in detective fiction the solution is not all, that it is the author’s duty to provide entertainment along the way—as great a variety of entertainment, verbal and otherwise, as possible. In the second novel, for example, we are entertained in diverse fashions by Trent’s journey to Dieppe and the strange story of the Count d’Astalys and the Pavillon de l’Ecstase, by the remarkable tale of the Tiara of Megabyzus, and by the search for a bottle of Felix Poubelle 1884 and the authoritative remarks of ‘William Clerihew, the renowned and erudite wine-merchant of Fountain Court’. But the patterns of the two books are quite different. Trent’s Last Case is a beautiful example of the false-bottomed chest; and it is something even better, for once the false bottom has been revealed there is, still, a final, secret compartment to be discovered. (Perhaps at this point, without giving anything away, I may quote Bentley’s own remark that ‘it does not seem to have been generally noticed that Trent’s Last Case is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories’.) Trent’s Own Case, on the other hand, is a fine example of an expanding, divaricating narrative—it is, we may say not too fancifully, a veritable tree of a mystery that is, as we read, constantly putting out new branches before our eyes.

In the short stories both author and detective are in their most light-hearted mood and most ingenious vein. Indeed, in one or two instances, readers who are unwilling or unable to follow Coleridge’s famous advice, by momentarily engaging in ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, may feel that both author and detective are too ingenious and too light-hearted in their cavalier disregard of plausibility. But one should, I think, bear in mind while reading the short stories that Bentley was by nature a humorist with a strong liking for the preposterous. One might remember, too, that he was a close friend of Chesterton, and read his tales with the idea that he may well have been tempted to make some of Trent’s exploits rival Father Brown’s most fantastic triumphs in the realms of improbability. However, I am sure that even his most captious reader will have to admit that in the field of the detective short story, as in that of the detective novel, Bentley has produced at least one masterpiece. ‘The Genuine Tabard’ will take a lot of beating.

Here then is a body of writing that is not only enjoyable for its own sake but important in literary history. Edmund Clerihew Bentley—whose last book was a ‘shocker’ called Elephant’s Work, published in 1950—bears a heavy responsibility for the course taken by the detective story during what has surely proved its period of greatest glory. It is hardly necessary to add that he bears no responsibility at all for the moronic mixture of sex and sadism that is now masquerading under the ancient and honorable name of detective fiction. Readers who are looking for that kind of thing must go to another shop.

BEN RAY REDMAN

1953

PREFACE (#ulink_ab28ec81-1e29-5b6b-afad-e3ecce084755)

MEET TRENT (#ulink_ab28ec81-1e29-5b6b-afad-e3ecce084755)

I FEEL a little embarrassment in writing about the character of Philip Trent, because the poor fellow has made his appearance in only one single book. But it is a book which, I am glad to say, has had an extensive sale for many years past. I don’t say this out of boastfulness at all, but simply because it is my only excuse for holding forth on this occasion. The story called Trent’s Last Case was published in 1913. That is a long time ago. It takes us back to a day when the detective story was a very different thing from what it is now. I am not sure why Sherlock Holmes and his earlier imitators could never be at all amusing or light-hearted; but it may have been because they felt that they had a mission, and had to sustain a position of superiority to the ordinary run of mankind. Trent does not feel about himself in that way at all, as a short passage of dialogue from the book may indicate. The story is concerned with the murdering of a millionaire at his country place in Devonshire—one of the earliest of a long, long line of murdered millionaires. Trent makes his appearance at a country hotel near the scene of the crime; and there, to his surprise, he finds an old gentleman whom he knows well—Mr Cupples his name is—just finishing an open-air breakfast on the verandah. Trent gets out of his car and comes up the steps.

TRENT: Cupples, by all that’s miraculous! My luck is certainly serving me today. How are you, my best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit’st thou by that ruined breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it passed away? I am glad to see you.

CUPPLES: I was half expecting you, Trent. You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet. Will you have it at my table here?

TRENT: Rather! An enormous great breakfast, too. I expect this to be a hard day for me. I shan’t eat again till the evening, very likely. You guess why I’m here, don’t you?

CUPPLES: Undoubtedly. You have come down to write about the murder for the Daily Record.

TRENT: That is rather a colourless way of stating it. I should prefer to put it that I have come down in the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty, and vindicate the honour of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at their private residences.

One of the most hackneyed of quotations is that from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, about the man who said he had tried being a philosopher but found that cheerfulness would keep breaking in. Philip Trent has the same trouble about being a detective. He is apt to give way to frivolity and the throwing about of absurd quotations from the poets at almost any moment. There was nothing like that about the older, sterner school of fiction detectives. They never laughed, and only rarely and with difficulty did they smile. They never read anything but the crime reports in the papers, and if they ever quoted, it was from nothing but their own pamphlets on the importance of collar-studs in the detection of crime, or the use of the banana-skin as an instrument of homicide. They were not by any means blind to their own abilities or importance. Holmes, for instance, would say when speaking of his tracking down of Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, such words as these:

‘You know my powers, my dear Watson, but I am forced to confess that I have at last met an antagonist who is my intellectual equal.’ Or, again, Holmes says, when he is facing the prospect of losing his life: ‘If my record were closed tonight, I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence. In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers on the wrong side.’

If I used to feel, as probably very many others used to feel, that a change from that style might not be a bad thing, it was certainly not in any spirit of undervaluing that marvellous creation of Conan Doyle’s. My own belief is that the adventures of Sherlock Holmes are likely to be read at least as long as anything else that was written in their time, because they are great stories, the work of a powerful and vivid imagination. And I should add this: that all detective stories written since Holmes was created, including my own story, have been founded more or less on that remarkable body of work. Holmes would often say, ‘You know my methods, Watson.’ Well, we all got to know his methods; and we all followed those methods, so far as the business of detection went.

The attempt to introduce a more modern sort of character-drawing into that business was altogether another thing. It has brought into existence a rich variety of types of detective hero, as this series of talks is showing. My own attempt was among the very earliest; and I realize now, as I hardly did at the time, that the idea at the bottom of it was to get as far away from the Holmes tradition as possible. Trent, as I have said, does not take himself at all seriously. He is not a scientific expert; he is not a professional crime investigator. He is an artist, a painter, by calling, who has strayed accidentally into the business of crime journalism because he found he had an aptitude for it, and without any sense of having a mission. He is not superior to the feelings of average humanity; he does not stand aloof from mankind, but enjoys the society of his fellow creatures and makes friends with everybody. He even goes so far as to fall in love. He does not regard the Scotland Yard men as a set of bungling half-wits, but has the highest respect for their trained abilities. All very unlike Holmes.

Trent’s attitude towards the police is frankly one of sporting competition with opponents who are quite as likely to beat him as he is to beat them. I will introduce here another scrap of dialogue from Trent’s Last Case that illustrates this. Trent and Chief Inspector Murch have just been hearing the story of Martin, the very correct butler in the service of the man who had been murdered on the previous day. Martin has just bowed himself impressively out of the room, and Trent falls into an arm-chair and draws a long breath.

TRENT: Martin is a great creature. He is far, far better than a play. There is none like him, none. Straight, too; not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man.

MURCH: I never said anything about suspecting him. Still, there’s no point in denying it—I have got my eye on him. He’s such a very cool customer. You remember the case of Lord William Russell’s valet, who went in as usual in the morning, as quiet and starchy as you please, to draw up the blinds in his master’s bedroom a few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. But, of course, Martin doesn’t know I’ve got him in mind.

TRENT: No; he wouldn’t. He is a wonderful creature, a great artist; but in spite of that, he is not at all a sensitive type. It has never occurred to his mind that you could suspect him. But I could see it. You must understand, Inspector, that I have made a special study of the psychology of officers of the law. It’s a grossly neglected branch of knowledge. They are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly so easy. All the time we were questioning him I saw handcuffs in your eye. Your lips were mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous words: ‘It is my duty to tell you that anything you now say may be taken down and used in evidence at your trial.’

That is a fair specimen of Trent, and I found that people seemed to like it for a change.

I found another thing: that the building up of a satisfactory mystery story was a very much more difficult affair than I had ever imagined. I had undertaken the writing of a detective story with a light heart. It came of a suggestion—I might call it a challenge—offered by my old friend, G. K. Chesterton, and I did not suppose it would be a very formidable undertaking. But I did not realize what it was that I had set my hand to. Once the plot was started it began to grow. It got completely out of hand. It ought to have ended at a point a little more than half-way through the book as it stands. But not at all; the story wouldn’t have that. It insisted upon carrying the thing to a conclusion entirely different from the quite satisfactory one, as I thought, reached in Chapter XI; and then it had to go on to still another at the very end, in Chapter XVI.

So, being then engaged in earning my living by other means, I formed the opinion that writing detective stories was not, so far as I was concerned, an ideal way of occupying one’s spare time. And that is why the novel was called Trent’s Last Case.

E.C. BENTLEY

1935

THE CHARACTERS AND SITUATIONS in this work are wholly fictional and imaginary, and do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons or parties.

I (#ulink_55b3c128-3d5a-5f9d-b2b3-159ecbc45e7e)

THE GENUINE TABARD (#ulink_55b3c128-3d5a-5f9d-b2b3-159ecbc45e7e)

IT was quite by chance, at a dinner party given by the American Naval Attaché, that Philip Trent met the Langleys, who were visiting Europe for the first time. During the cocktail time before dinner was served, he had gravitated towards George D. Langley, because he was the finest looking man in the room—tall, strongly built, carrying his years lightly, pink of face, with vigorous, massive features and thick grey hair.

They had talked about the Tower of London, the Cheshire Cheese, and the Zoo, all of which the Langleys had visited that day. Langley, so the attaché had told Trent, was a distant relative of his own; he had made a large fortune manufacturing engineers’ drawing-office equipment, was a prominent citizen of Cordova, Ohio, the headquarters of his business, and had married a Schuyler. Trent, though not sure what a Schuyler was, gathered that it was an excellent thing to marry, and this impression was confirmed when he found himself placed next to Mrs Langley at dinner.

Mrs Langley always went on the assumption that her own affairs were the most interesting subject of conversation; and as she was a vivacious and humorous talker and a very handsome and good-hearted woman, she usually turned out to be right. She informed Trent that she was crazy about old churches, of which she had seen and photographed she did not know how many in France, Germany, and England. Trent, who loved thirteenth-century stained glass, mentioned Chartres, which Mrs Langley said, truly enough, was too perfect for words. He asked if she had been to Fairford in Gloucestershire. She had; and that was, she declared with emphasis, the greatest day of all their time in Europe; not because of the church, though that was certainly lovely, but because of the treasure they had found that afternoon.

Trent asked to be told about this; and Mrs Langley said that it was quite a story. Mr Gifford had driven them down to Fairford in his car. Did Trent know Mr Gifford—W. N. Gifford, who lived at the Suffolk Hotel? He was visiting Paris just now. Trent ought to meet him, because Mr Gifford knew everything there was to know about stained glass, and church ornaments, and brasses, and antiques in general. They had met him when he was sketching some traceries in Westminster Abbey, and they had become great friends. He had driven them about to quite a few places within reach of London. He knew all about Fairford, of course, and they had a lovely time there.