Trent's Last Case

“One of the three best detective stories ever written.” —Agatha Christie

On Wall Street, the mere mention of the name Sigsbee Manderson is enough to send a stock soaring—or bring it tumbling back to earth. Feared but not loved, Manderson has no one to mourn him when the gardener at his British country estate finds him facedown in the dirt, a bullet buried in his brain. There are bruises on his wrist and blood on his clothes, but no clue that will lead the police to the murderer. It will take an amateur to—inadvertently—show them the way.Cheerful, charming, and always eager for a mystery, portrait artist and gentleman sleuth Philip Trent leaps into the Manderson affair with all the passion of the autodidact. Simply by reading the newspapers, he discovers overlooked details of the crime. Not all of his reasoning is sound, and his romantic interests are suspect, to say the least, but Trent’s dedication to the art of detection soon uncovers what no one expected him to find: the truth.Delightfully irreverent yet ingeniously plotted, Trent’s Last Case is widely regarded as a masterwork of the mystery genre.This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Review“The finest detective story of modern times.” —G. K. Chesterton

“One of the few genuine classics of detective fiction.” —The New York Times

“It is a masterpiece.” —Dorothy L. Sayers

About the AuthorE. C. Bentley (1875–1956) was an English humorist and author of mysteries. His best-known work is Trent’s Last Case (1913), a comic mystery inspired by Bentley’s frustration with the airtight solutions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. A landmark work, Trent’s Last Case has been called the dawn of crime fiction’s Golden Age.

When a scheming American capitalist is found dead in the garden of his English country house, two immediate matters confound amateur detective Philip Trent: why is the dead man not wearing his false teeth and why is his young widow seemingly relieved at his death? The newly widowed Mabel Manderson - 'the lady in black' - has a disarming effect on the refreshingly fallible and imaginative Trent, in this classic detective story that twists and turns as a result of the irresistible combination of ingenious deductions and misplaced assumptions. - 'One of the three best detective stories ever written' Agatha Christie. 'It is the one detective story of the present century which I am certain will go down to posterity as a classic. It is a masterpiece' Dorothy L Sayers

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