A lifelong friend of G.K. Chesterton and best known for his invention of the four-line verse form the clerihew (the word derives from his middle name), Bentley earned his living as a journalist on The Daily Telegraph. He began Trent's Last Case, which is dedicated to Chesterton, as a spoof of the crime fiction of his day but it developed into a genuinely intriguing and satisfying mystery story. Set in an upper middleclass semi-bohemia which has long since disappeared, the book begins when American financier Sigsbee Manderson is found murdered and minus his false teeth in the garden of his English country home. Philip Trent is a languidly witty painter-about-town who decides that it is up to him to solve the mystery surrounding the American's death. He does everything that the amateur detective in such novels is supposed to do, painstakingly gathering evidence and assessing other characters' potential for murder, but he draws all the wrong conclusions. Clues are misinterpreted; suspicions fall on the wrong people. Trent also makes the cardinal mistake for any detective of falling in love with the chief suspect, Manderson's young, attractive and insufficiently grieving widow.

Trent is an engaging hero, if not a very effective one. (Only when the real criminal explains the sequence of events to him does he understand just how Manderson died.) He appeared only in this novel, in a collection of short stories (Trent Intervenes) and in a much less satisfying, longer narrative co-written with H. Warner Allen. Bentley may have intended his book as a pastiche of a genre that was growing ever more popular at the time it was published but it is as ingeniously plotted as any other mystery of the period and can now be read with pleasure as a perfect example of the kind of fiction it was originally meant to parody.

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