Trent Intervenes. E. C. Bentley
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,