E. C. Bentley

• Born: July 10, 1875
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 30, 1956
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Philip Trent, 1913-1938

Contribution

In crime fiction, vivid, enduring character, not to be confused with caricature, is rare, as it is often cramped by the machinery of the plot. Also, to the practiced reader, mystery often becomes anything but insoluble. In Philip Trent, however, E. C. Bentley created a memorable companion, and in Trent’s Last Case (1913, revised 1929), the first book in which Trent appeared, he devised a plot of successive thrilling denouements and an ending quite impossible to foresee. The book was written to divert the course of English detective fiction, and in this, as well as in sales and reviews, it was an outstanding success.

Sherlock Holmes, an important figure of Bentley’s youth, so dominated the field that his inventor, Arthur Conan Doyle, was called on to solve real crimes. Bentley challenged Doyle’s icy, introverted, infallible hero with a good-humored, susceptible extrovert who caught the public mood and became as much a model for less original writers as Sherlock Holmes had been. The shift in the heroic notion from the disdainful self-sufficiency of Holmes to the sociable misapprehensions of Trent prefigures the change in sensibility accelerated by World War I, in which old certainties as well as young men died.

Biography

It would be hard to invent a background more representative than Edmund Clerihew Bentley’s of the English Edwardian governing class. His father was an official in the Lord Chancellor’s department, the equivalent of a ministry of justice. He was educated at a private London boys’ school, St. Paul’s, and at nineteen, he won a history scholarship to Merton College, in Oxford. He made friends at school with G. K. Chesterton, who remained his closest friend for life, and at Oxford University with John Buchan and Hilaire Belloc. All would become famous writers.

At Oxford, Bentley became president of the Oxford Union, a skeleton key to success in many careers, and experienced the “shame and disappointment” of a second-class degree. Down from Oxford and studying law in London, he published light verse and reviews in magazines. In 1901, he married Violet Alice Mary Boileau, the daughter of General Neil Edmonstone Boileau of the Bengal Staff Corps. Bentley was called to the bar the following year but did not remain in the legal profession, having, in the words of a friend, all the qualifications of a barrister except the legal mind. He went instead into journalism, a profession he loved and in which he found considerable success.

For ten years, Bentley worked for the Daily News, becoming deputy editor. In 1912, he joined the Daily Telegraph as an editorialist. In 1913, he published Trent’s Last Case. It was an immediate, and, for its author, an unexpected success. Strangely, nothing was heard of its hero, Philip Trent, for another twenty-three years.

Although Trent’s Last Case was repeatedly reprinted, translated, and filmed, Bentley went on writing editorials for the Daily Telegraph, and it was not until two years after his retirement from journalism in 1934 that there appeared Trent’s Own Case, written with H. Warner Allen. A book of short stories, Trent Intervenes, followed in 1938, and Those Days: An Autobiography appeared in 1940. Elephant’s Work, a mystery without Trent, which John Buchan had advised him to write as early as 1916, appeared in 1950.

In 1939, with younger journalists being called to arms, Bentley returned to the Daily Telegraph as chief literary critic; he stayed until 1947. After the death of his wife in 1949, he gave up their home in London and lived out the rest of his life in a London hotel. Of their two sons, one became an engineer, and the other, Nicolas, became a distinguished illustrator and the author of several thrillers.

Analysis

Trent’s Last Case stands in the flagstoned hall of English crime fiction like a tall clock ticking in the silence, always chiming perfect time. From the well-bred simplicity of that famous, often-adapted title to the startling last sequence, everything is unexpected, delightful, and fresh. The ingenious plot twists through the book like a clear stream, never flooding, never drying up, but always glinting somewhere in the sunlight and leading on into mysterious depths.

In this landscape, the characters move clearly and memorably, casting real, rippling shadows and at times, as in real life, disappearing for a moment from view. It is a consciously moral vision, as the opening sentence proclaims: “Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?” The morality, although not quite orthodox, is the morality of a decent man to whom life presents no alternative to decency. It is a morality that the hero and his creator share.

Trent’s Last Case is the work of a man who thought, as many have thought, that he could write a better detective story than those he had read. Having satisfied himself and others on this point, he did not write another crime novel until after he had retired from what he always regarded as his real work, newspaper journalism.

A better background for an English detective-fiction writer than E. C. Bentley’s is difficult to imagine. His father was involved with crime and its punishment through his work as an official in the Lord Chancellor’s department; Bentley’s own classical education, followed by three years studying history at Oxford, insisted on the importance of clear, grammatical speech and orderly ideas; in his period in chambers when qualifying as a barrister, he came into contact with the ponderous engines of judgment and witnessed the difficulties to be encountered encompassing the subtle complexities of truth; and finally, he had acquired the habit of summoning words to order in his capacity as a daily journalist.

To the happy accident of birth among the English governing class in its most glorious years, nature added a playfulness with words—a talent that brought a new noun into the English language. Bentley was sixteen and attending a science class at St. Paul’s when four lines drifted into his head:

Sir Humphrey DavyAbominated gravy.He lived in the odiumOf having discovered Sodium.

The form amused him and his friends, and he carried on writing in it, eventually for Punch, and published a collection in 1905. This collection, entitled Biography for Beginners, was Bentley’s first book; it was brought out under the name of E. Clerihew. For a time, clerihews rivaled limericks in popularity, and something of their spirit and cadence survives in the light verse of Ogden Nash and Don Marquis. Some of this playfulness shows through in Trent’s conversation; although Bentley hopes in vain that the reader will believe that Trent’s “eyes narrowed” as he spotted a clue and that “both men sat with wrinkled brows,” the style is generally nimble and urbane and does not impede the action.

The language runs aground only when confronted by American speech. These are the words in which the closest lieutenant of one of the most powerful men on earth addresses an English gentleman and a high-ranking Scotland Yard detective: “I go right by that joint. Say, cap, are you coming my way too?” Bentley edited and wrote introductions to several volumes of short stories by Damon Runyon, whose work he enjoyed all of his life, and it is likely that his American idiom derives from this source.

Trent’s Last Case

Bentley, in 1911, left the deputy editorship of the Daily News, which he had joined because it was “bitterly opposed to the South African war. I believed earnestly in liberty and equality. I still do.” He became an editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph, which gave him more time for himself. Trent’s Last Case came out two years later. It redefined the standards by which this kind of fiction is judged.

In Trent’s Last Case, an American of vast wealth living in England is murdered. He has acquired his fortune by the unscrupulous but not unusual strategy of manipulating markets and intimidating those who bar his way. Yet it cannot be the wealth that Bentley condemns but the corruption of those who spend their lives in the pursuit of it, since hereditary landowners in Great Britain possessed wealth of a far more enduring and substantial sort. Bentley saw the new breed of American tycoon as insatiable, callous, and criminal—the murder was thought at first to be the work of underworld connections. Where F. Scott Fitzgerald saw Jay Gatsby, his rich bootlegger, as a figure of romance, even a kind of apotheosis of the American Dream, Bentley saw Sigsbee Manderson as the quintessence of evil.

The implicit belief that a gentlemanly and convivial existence is a mirror of the moral life, if not indeed the moral life itself, and that evildoing leads to madness, or is indeed madness itself, gives the book a moral certitude that crime writers in more fragmented times have found hard to match. Yet certitude can still be found in British life, at least that part of it sustained by an expensive education and inherited wealth. The rich conventionally bring with them an agreeable social style; the nouveau riche do not. A society based on acquired wealth, such as American society, could make a hero out of Gatsby; a society based on inherited wealth made a villain out of Manderson.

Trent epitomizes the difference between English and American fictional detectives. The English detective, coming from the high table of society (Trent, Lord Peter Wimsey), is far more clever than the mainly working-class police. The reader is unlikely to quibble. In the United States, the best crime fiction has been written around the type of private eye who seldom knows where the next client is coming from ( Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald) or around hard-pressed cops doing their all-too-fallible best ( Ed McBain). In a republic, the best fictional detectives come from the people; in a kingdom, they come from privilege. Trent’s tangible presence derives from his background and his circumstances being so close to those of his creator.

Sigsbee Manderson’s passing is regretted only by those who stood to lose money by it. One of those who did not was his wife. Nevertheless, Mabel Manderson is the antithesis of all the double-crossing dames brought to a peak of perfection if not credibility by Hammett and Chandler and subsequently parodied in the espionage stories of the Cold War.

Goodness, as John Milton and others have found, is harder to embody than evil. Mabel Manderson in less talented hands would have become a stock character, but in Bentley’s, she is the ideal woman, fair and caring and moral. In turning her back on a vast fortune for love, she follows her heart as blithely as Trent, by his chivalrous behavior toward her, follows the public-school ethic of his day, an ethic that a year later would accompany the doomed young officer conscripts into the trenches and later still the young fighter pilots into the Battle of Britain.

The popular appeal of crime writing relies on the author’s ability to make the reader care about what happens next. Bentley achieves this by careful plotting and by making people and events interesting in themselves. Bentley’s engineering was always too solid to need passages of violent action or Chandler’s remedy for an ailing plot—having somebody come through the door with a gun. Bentley in any case did not believe in gore: “My outlook was established by the great Victorians, who passed on to me the ideas of the Greeks about essential values, namely, physical health, freedom of mind, care for the truth, justice, and beauty.”

Bentley was nevertheless a product of his background in attitude to servants. A manservant must instantly recognize a gentleman and address him with a subtly different deference from that with which he would address a detective. Manderson’s manservant passes this test, calling Trent “Sir” and the detective merely “Mr. Murch.” It at once becomes clear that this is not to be a case in which the butler did it.

Yet Mr. Manderson’s maid, French in the fashion of the time and consequently lacking in reserve, is severely rebuked: “A star upon your birthday burned, whose fierce, severe, red, pulseless planet never yearned in heaven, Celestine. Mademoiselle, I am busy. Bonjour.” This reprimand strangely mixes misogyny, class contempt, and xenophobia. To an Englishwoman of equal social standing, however, Trent behaves with unexceptionable gallantry. With Mrs. Manderson, he is the unworthy knight, she the princess in the tower. Indeed, Mrs. Manderson emerges as the central, and finest, character in the book. Whereas in the Hammett-Chandler school women are conventionally untrustworthy to the degree that they are desirable, Mabel Manderson is as idealized as any fine lady in troubadour verse. That she symbolizes the importance of family life becomes even more clear later in Trent’s Own Case.

An attempt, as Bentley put it, at “a new kind of detective story,” Trent’s Last Case was an immediate success and its reputation and sales in many languages continue to grow. The Dictionary of National Biography called it “the best detective novel of the century.” The New York Times described the novel as “one of the few classics of crime fiction.” John Carter, one of the founding editors of Time magazine, said it was “the father of the contemporary detective novel” and marked “the beginning of the naturalistic era.” The critic Frank Swinnerton viewed it as “the finest long detective story ever written.” Finally, continuous praise has been heaped on it by other writers of crime: “An acknowledged masterpiece,” Dorothy L. Sayers; “One of the three best detective stories ever written,” Agatha Christie; “The finest detective story of modern times,” G. K. Chesterton; “The best detective story we have ever read,” G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole; “A masterpiece,” Edgar Wallace.

Nothing else Bentley wrote had such success, including his autobiography. Detective stories are a reaffirmation of the medieval morality plays, in which evil is always vanquished and good always triumphant. To these reassuring fables, Bentley brought a new complexity, a humbling of the overweening intellect, and a glorification of the modesty of the heart. The occasional shortcomings in sympathy derive from his milieu, which exerted such an influence over his vision; the completely original mixture of ingenuity and good humor has never been matched and is all Bentley’s own.

Principal Series Character:

• Philip Trent , in his thirties, became famous for publicly solving crimes in the columns of The Record. A successful painter, he is by no means arty, and despite a love of poetry, he has the enviable knack of getting along with all sorts of people. He is the ideal young Englishman of his day.

Bibliography

Chesterton, G. K. Autobiography. 1936. Reprint. London: Hutchinson, 1969. Novelist Chesterton details his relationship to Bentley and the mutual influence of the two writers.

Chesterton, G. K. Come to Think of It: A Book of Essays. London: Metheun, 1930. Includes Chesterton’s thoughts on the work of his friend and colleague.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. 1941. Reprint. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984. Organizes the history of detective fiction into a “biography” and situates Bentley’s works in relation to others in the narrative.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Discusses the brief but distinctive Edwardian period in detective fiction. Compares Bentley to such other Edwardians as Chesterton and John Buchan.

Panek, LeRoy. “E. C. Bentley.” In Watteau’s Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain, 1914-1940. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979. Compares Bentley to his contemporaries and details his contribution to and reception by British culture.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Sheds light on Bentley’s work.