Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within She Done It that documents my journey

of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series,

in order. Our book today is Trent's Last Case by EC Bentley, Penguin 78.

This book was first published in 1913 and then added to the Penguin series in January

1937. When it first appeared before the First World War, there was no such thing as the Golden

Age of Detective fiction. The puzzle-based mysteries that were to dominate the crime fiction

of the interwar years were still in the far-off future. And yet, Trentzler's case comes with

an impeccable Golden Age pedigree, almost as if it is commenting on a literary

movement that didn't yet exist. Many of the tropes and motifs that we now think of as standard

come together for the first time in this book. But Trent's last case goes further, providing

a comic send-up of aspects like the relationship between an amateur and professional detective,

a sleuth's predilection for falling in love with the prime suspect,

and a hero's ability to jump to the wrong conclusions.

When reading it, I constantly had to remind myself that the character of Philip Trent,

artist, journalist, and now amateur sleuth,

was created at least a decade before the likes of Albert Campion and Peter Wimsy, not after. As if to hammer home its precocious place

in the canon of crime fiction, Trent's case is dedicated to Bentley's school friend, G.K. Chesterton,

who was the first president of the Detection Club.

A number of members of that August institution also heaped praise upon the book.

Agatha Christie called it one of the three best detective stories ever written.

Dorothy Else says that it is the one detective story of the present century,

...