Showing posts with label E C Bentley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label E C Bentley. Show all posts

20220922

Strong Poison

Author departs from tradition by letting her detective fall in love

Strong Poison is the fifth of Dorothy L Sayers's Wimsey novels
Strong Poison is the fifth of
Dorothy L Sayers's Wimsey novels
Dorothy L Sayers allows her noble sleuth to have a love interest in Strong Poison, the fifth novel she wrote featuring the exploits of amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey.

The author introduces the character of Harriet Vane, a crime novelist, who, like Wimsey, is Oxford educated and has had an unhappy time romantically.

When Wimsey sees Harriet Vane for the first time, she is in the dock, accused of the murder of her ex-lover, the poet Philip Boyes.

Strong Poison, which was published in 1930, is considered to be a major departure for a Golden Age mystery as it shows the detective falling in love with a woman accused of the murder that is central to the plot.

Dorothy L Sayers fans have speculated that the writer modelled Harriet Vane on herself. The writer had suffered a romantic disappointment and by creating the long-drawn-out romance between Harriet Vane and Wimsey, which was to run through four novels, it allowed her to have a vicarious affair with the detective herself, far-fetched though this might seem now.

Dorothy had been very impressed with the novel Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913. In the story, the detective, Philip Trent, falls in love with the wife of the murder victim.

Right until the end of the novel the reader does not know for certain that the wife is not the murderer. E C Bentley’s novel was intended as a send up of the classic crime story and it also involves the hero detective identifying the wrong person as the murderer close to the end of the story, completely at odds with the conventions of the genre. But Dorothy, along with many other readers, really liked the novel and went on record as saying that Bentley’s novel ‘holds a very special place in the history of detective fiction.’

In Strong Poison, the victim, Harriet’s ex-lover Philip Boyes, has died from arsenic poisoning. He has attempted to engineer a reconciliation with Harriet on the night of his death and she has given him a cup of coffee while listening to what he had to say. She is accused of the murder because she is found to have bought poison under an assumed name. She has claimed this was to test one of the plot points in the crime novel she is currently writing.

Sayers herself had suffered a romantic disappointment
Sayers herself had suffered
a romantic disappointment
Fortunately, the trial results in a hung jury and the judge has to order a retrial. With no time to lose, Wimsey visits Harriet in prison to tell her he is convinced of her innocence and is determined to catch the real murderer. He also asks her to marry him, but she turns him down politely.

The jury has failed to return a unanimous verdict because one person sitting on it could not bring herself to believe in Harriet’s guilt. This is Miss Katharine Climpson, a spinster who, coincidentally, sometimes works for Wimsey by carrying out inquiries and undercover work because she has to live in difficult financial circumstances and needs to earn some money.

Wimsey deploys her to gather evidence for his inquiry and, in one hilarious scene, she is obliged to pose as a medium and hold a séance to obtain the information he needs. Miss Climpson first appeared doing undercover work for Wimsey in the novel, Unnatural Death, two years before Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, also a spinster with a talent for detection, was introduced on the crime fiction scene.

As well as being an intriguing mystery, Strong Poison explores some of the issues of the time, such as sex before marriage and the double standards that were applied to the behaviour of men and women. The novel is intricately plotted and written in a very entertaining style and I would highly recommend that you read it. 

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20220309

The Layton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

First appearance by author turned sleuth Roger Sheringham

The paperback edition of The Layton Court Mystery
The paperback edition of The
Layton Court Mystery
The Layton Court Mystery
, published in 1925, was the first detective novel by journalist Anthony Berkeley Cox, who was to become one of the founding members of the elite Detection Club.

His series detective, Roger Sheringham, is one of the guests at a country house party being held at a Jacobean mansion called Layton Court. The character, who is an author, was to feature in another ten detective novels and many short stories by Berkeley.

The party is being hosted by Victor Stanworth, a genial and hospitable man, aged about 60, who has taken Layton Court for the summer to enable him to entertain his friends in style.

At the start of the book, Sheringham has been enjoying Stanworth’s generous hospitality for three days until the party is given the grim news during breakfast that their host appeared to have locked himself in the library and shot himself.

Sheringham is not convinced that his host has committed suicide and sets out to investigate the mystery himself, using his friend, Alec Grierson, who is also in the party, as his ‘Watson’.

Anthony Berkeley was just one of the pen names used by Anthony Berkeley Cox, who died 51 years ago today (9 March 1971). He also wrote novels under the names Francis Iles and A. Monmouth Platts.

Anthony Berkeley Cox helped found the Detection Club in 1930, along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. It was to become an elite dining club for British mystery writers, which met in London, under the presidency of G. K. Chesterton. There was an initiation ritual and an oath had to be sworn by new members promising not to rely on Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God in their work.

Berkeley Cox wrote 19 crime novels before returning to journalism
Berkeley Cox wrote 19 crime novels
before returning to journalism
In The Layton Court Mystery, Sheringham does not conceal anything from his friend, Alec Grierson, and therefore the reader has the same information to help them solve the crime as the detective himself.

I found The Layton Court Mystery unexciting and stilted at the beginning, but the writing improved a lot as the book progressed.

I thought Roger Sheringham had the potential to be a good character, although some of the rather fatuous dialogue at the beginning reminded me of Lord Peter Wimsey at the start of Whose Body?  the first novel by Dorothy L Sayers that he appeared in.

Sheringham sometimes tells Grierson what detectives in books would do in particular circumstances, showing that the character, like his creator Berkeley, is a devotee of the genre.

The amateur detective jumps to a few wrong conclusions along the way and follows up each of his theories until he accepts that they are disproved. He tells the other characters that he is asking questions because he has ‘natural curiosity’, to cover up the fact he is interrogating people he doesn’t really know, which was not considered good form at the time.

He sometimes says he is looking for material for his next novel and one of the characters actually says to him: ‘Everything’s “copy” to you, you mean?’

He also finds clues, such as a footprint, a hair, a piece of a broken vase and a trace of face powder, to help him work out what has taken place in the library.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case sold more than a million copies
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
sold more than a million copies
Anthony Berkeley Cox was born in Watford in 1893 and educated at Sherborne School and University College, Oxford. After serving as an officer in the First World War, he began writing for magazines, such as Punch and The Humorist.

He wrote 19 crime novels between 1925 and 1939 before returning to journalism and writing for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. From 1950 to 1970, the year before he died, he contributed to the Manchester Guardian, later, the Guardian newspaper.

Berkeley’s amateur detective, Sheringham, had his most famous outing in The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which was published in 1929. The novel received rapturous reviews and sold more than one million copies. It is now regarded as a classic of the Golden Age of detective fiction. 

At times, The Layton Court Mystery reminded me of Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, published in 1913, which was originally intended to be a skit on the detective story genre. Like Trent, Sheringham doesn’t actually solve the case until the real murderer confesses to him right at the end.

However, by the end of The Layton Court Mystery, I had taken to Roger Sheringham and I now look forward to reading the next book in the series.

The Layton Court Mystery was first published in London by Herbert Jenkins in 1925 and in New York by Doubleday, Doran and Company in 1929. It was republished by Spitfire Publications Ltd in 2021. 

Anthony Berkeley's books are available from and 

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20210517

100 Must-Read Crime Novels

A unique selection of stunning examples of the genre

This handy guide by Richard Shephard and Nick Rennison provides a treat for all lovers of detective fiction by choosing 100 books to give readers an overview of the rich and diverse crime writing that has been produced over the years.

The authors did not intend to provide a list of the 100 best crime novels because of the difficulty of comparing books written in different eras and with varied intentions.

An invaluable guide for beginners and 
established fans of the crime fiction genre


They aimed to provide a book that would be useful as a starting point for readers wanting to explore the genre. Their selections are arranged A to Z by author and describe the plot of the novel without spoiling it for prospective readers. They include information about the authors and where they are placed in the history of crime fiction.

At the end of each entry there is a Read On list with suggestions of books to read by stylistically similar authors. Most authors have one entry only, but Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have been allowed two entries, because they have been judged so important to the genre. 

There is also a brief history of crime fiction and lists of the winners of the Edgar Award and the CWA Golden Dagger Award right from the beginning.

The book selects many well-known crime writers but there are also some names that are less familiar. E C Bentley has an entry for his ground-breaking 1913 novel, Trent’s Last Case. Lawyer Michael Gilbert has been chosen for his 1950 legal mystery Smallbone Deceased and Cyril Hare, who was a judge in real life, for his legal mystery When the Wind Blows, published in 1949.

Francis Iles, with Malice Aforethought, and Michael Innes, with Hamlet Revenge! have both been chosen for novels written in the 1930s.

Having to pick just one Dorothy L Sayers novel, it is fascinating to see that  they went for The Nine Tailors, published in 1934.  For Josephine Tey, they picked her 1948 novel, The Franchise Affair.

Ruth Rendell manages to get two entries, both as herself with An Unkindness of Ravens (1985) and as Barbara Vine, with A Fatal Inversion (1987).

European writers are represented with entries on Gaston Leroux, Georges Simenon, Henning Mankell and Manuel Vasquex Montalban.

American writers featured include Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, Donna Leon and Vera Caspary.

This guide offers readers an invaluable introduction to authors they may never have tried before but might grow to love.

100 Must-Read Crime Novels is packed with useful book suggestions and fascinating information for crime fiction fans.

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20210329

Trent’s Last Case

A look back at the career of E C Bentley who wrote the detective novel that heralded the Golden Age

E C Bentley intended his novel to be a send-up of the detective genre
E C Bentley intended his novel to
be a send-up of the detective genre
The writer and journalist E C Bentley, who is credited with writing the first modern detective story, Trent’s Last Case, died 65 years ago today in London.

Agatha Christie, who wrote her own first detective novel seven years later, said Trent’s Last Case was ‘one of the best detective stories ever written’.

Dorothy L Sayers, whose first detective novel was published in 1923, said Bentley’s novel ‘holds a very special place in the history of detective fiction.’

But when Bentley wrote Trent’s Last Case, first published in 1913, he intended it to be a major send-up of the genre, which had tended to feature intellectual detectives lacking any obvious human failings.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born in London in 1875. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, Oxford, and then studied Law in London while working as a journalist for several newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. Although he was called to the Bar in 1902 he continued to work for the Daily Telegraph until he retired in 1934.

But he returned to the newspaper after World War II started because younger men were being called up, retiring again in 1947.

He became friends with the writer of the Father Brown stories, G K Chesterton, while they were still at school and later in life they were both, in turn, president of the Detection Club.

Agatha Christie spoke in glowing terms of Trent's Last Case
Agatha Christie spoke in glowing
terms of Trent's Last Case
Bentley started work on Trent’s Last Case in 1910 having had the idea for ‘a detective story of a new sort...’

Bentley thought it should be possible to write a detective story in which the detective was recognisable as an average, fallible human being.  He said: ‘It was not until I had gone a long way with the plot that the most pleasing notion of all came to me: the notion of making the hero’s hard won and obviously correct solution to the mystery turn out to be completely wrong…’

The story begins with a powerful and ruthless American capitalist being found dead in the garden of his English country house, fully clothed, but without his false teeth. His young, beautiful widow seems relieved by her husband’s death. The household also includes a butler, a French maid and two young male secretaries.

It appears to be an intriguing case and therefore artist, journalist and amateur detective Philip Trent is sent to investigate by his newspaper.

Bentley planned his novel in just a few weeks while walking from his home in Hampstead to his office and he began work on it by writing the final chapter first.

In the novel, he allows his hero, Trent, to fall in love with the beautiful widow, which was at the time considered against the rules of the genre. He then introduces a plotting innovation that qualifies Trent’s Last Case to take its place among the great detective novels of all time.

The Collins Crime Club edition of Trent's Last Case
The Collins Crime Club edition
of Trent's Last Case
All detective writers that came afterwards owed a debt to Trent’s Last Case. Bentley’s experiment, with a detective who, unlike his predecessors, is a fallible human being and is operating within a cleverly constructed plot culminating in a surprise solution, prepared readers for the advent of an era in which they would learn to expect the unexpected. Trent’s Last Case heralded the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Bentley was to point out later that it does not seem to have been noticed that the novel is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories.

My copy of Trent’s Last Case, produced by Collins Crime Club, contains an Afterword by Dorothy L Sayers, which was taken from the draft of a talk she had written about a possible radio adaptation of the book, although there is no evidence that the talk was ever delivered.

Dorothy writes: ‘If  you were so lucky as to read it today for the first time, you would recognise it at once as a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, but you could have no idea how startlingly original it seemed when it first appeared. It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence.’

I found this particularly interesting as I recalled that in Dorothy’s first novel, Whose Body?, she used the technique used by Bentley in Trent’s Last Case, of a character dressing in the murder victim’s clothes and sleeping in his bed in order to confuse the authorities about the time of death. Whether this was ‘consciously or unconsciously,’ borrowed from Bentley, we don’t know.

I found Trent’s Last Case gripping and well written. I enjoyed it particularly because there isn’t just one surprise at the end, but two. However I don’t want to give anything else away. In the words of Dorothy, it is sufficient to say the novel is ‘a masterpiece.’

Michael Wilding (above) played Trent opposite the deceased's widow Margaret Lockwood in the 1952 film
Michael Wilding (above) played Trent opposite the
deceased's widow Margaret Lockwood in the 1952 film
Challenging the rules and conventions of detective fiction was not Bentley’s only literary innovation.

His first collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners, published in 1905, made a form of verse popular, which became known as the clerihew, after his middle name. This four line metrically irregular verse is one of his early examples of the clerihew:

‘Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered Sodium.’

Bentley dedicated Trent’s Last Case to G K Chesterton saying he owed him a book in return for Chesterton dedicating the Man Who Was Thursday to him.

Trent’s Last Case was adapted into a film three times, in 1920, 1929 and - with Michael Wilding as Trent in a cast featuring Margaret Lockwood and Orson Welles - in 1952.

After 23 years, Bentley relented and decided Trent hadn’t had his last case after all. He wrote Trent’s Own Case in 1936 and a book of short stories, Trent Intervenes, in 1938.

Trent’s Last Case was republished in paperback by Collins Crime Club in 2020.

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