Loe raamatut: «Trent Intervenes»

INTRODUCTION

A LITTLE more than four decades ago, in the dear, dead year of 1910, when world wars were still unknown and the Edwardian age was dying with its king, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a journalist on the staff of London’s Daily News, surveyed the state of the detective story and found it foul. But perhaps foul is too strong a word to use in connection with a polite man and a polite era; perhaps it would be better to say, simply, that Bentley found the state of the detective story unsatisfactory. He was not alone. As early as 1905 a contributor to the Academy had declared that ‘the detective in literature’ was ‘passing into decay’ and was carrying ‘with him the regret of a civilized world’.

Conan Doyle, the old master, was still very much alive as a man, with twenty years to go; but, although he was to produce three more volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, he was pretty well done as a writer, and his imitators, who came swarming into print after 1891, had proved themselves far better able to copy the master’s faults than to match his virtues. Hence E. C. Bentley’s disgust. Hence his determination to do something about it.

Others, indeed, were already doing something in their several ways. R. Austin Freeman’s detective, Dr John Thorndyke, making his debut in The Red Thumb Mark (1907), had introduced genuinely scientific methods of detection into fiction. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner had already taken his seat in the ABC tea shop and begun to unravel crimes while his fingers knotted and untied a piece of string. One of the Sûreté’s most famous sleuths, Monsieur Hanaud, creation of A. E. W. Mason, was just beginning his career. And Bentley’s dear friend, Gilbert K. Chesterton, had already started Father Brown on his amazing, fantastic journeys of detection, in which improbably brilliant guesses were destined repeatedly to cut straight to the core of quite impossible mysteries.

But Bentley had ideas of his own. He wished to write a full-length detective novel in which the protagonist would be ‘recognizable as a human being’. He wished also to get away from the solemnity that would have made Holmes himself insufferable, had it not been for his creator’s ingenuity, and that did make insufferable the imitations of Holmes. After 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, through the vigorous, characteristic leaders that he contributed to that journal for twenty-two years.

However he was not entirely hard-hearted towards Trent’s admirers. As time went by he consented to write a dozen short stories in which the genial, loquacious painter exercised his highly original powers of detection; and he also consented to write one more Trent novel, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, who was interestingly enough author of a book named Mr Clerihew: Wine Merchant. The short stories were collected and published, in 1938, under the title of Trent Intervenes.^fn1 The novel, Trent’s Own Case, appeared in 1936.

It would be pointless for me to add my mite to the mountain of praise that has been heaped on Trent’s Last Case—a book that Dorothy Sayers has roundly declared to be the one detective novel of its era that is sure to endure—but Trent’s Last Case and Trent’s Own Case are alike in that they both get better and better as they proceed. They are also alike in that they are the work of a writer who believed that in detective fiction the solution is not all, that it is the author’s duty to provide entertainment along the way—as great a variety of entertainment, verbal and otherwise, as possible. In the second novel, for example, we are entertained in diverse fashions by Trent’s journey to Dieppe and the strange story of the Count d’Astalys and the Pavillon de l’Ecstase, by the remarkable tale of the Tiara of Megabyzus, and by the search for a bottle of Felix Poubelle 1884 and the authoritative remarks of ‘William Clerihew, the renowned and erudite wine-merchant of Fountain Court’. But the patterns of the two books are quite different. Trent’s Last Case is a beautiful example of the false-bottomed chest; and it is something even better, for once the false bottom has been revealed there is, still, a final, secret compartment to be discovered. (Perhaps at this point, without giving anything away, I may quote Bentley’s own remark that ‘it does not seem to have been generally noticed that Trent’s Last Case is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories’.) Trent’s Own Case, on the other hand, is a fine example of an expanding, divaricating narrative—it is, we may say not too fancifully, a veritable tree of a mystery that is, as we read, constantly putting out new branches before our eyes.

In the short stories both author and detective are in their most light-hearted mood and most ingenious vein. Indeed, in one or two instances, readers who are unwilling or unable to follow Coleridge’s famous advice, by momentarily engaging in ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, may feel that both author and detective are too ingenious and too light-hearted in their cavalier disregard of plausibility. But one should, I think, bear in mind while reading the short stories that Bentley was by nature a humorist with a strong liking for the preposterous. One might remember, too, that he was a close friend of Chesterton, and read his tales with the idea that he may well have been tempted to make some of Trent’s exploits rival Father Brown’s most fantastic triumphs in the realms of improbability. However, I am sure that even his most captious reader will have to admit that in the field of the detective short story, as in that of the detective novel, Bentley has produced at least one masterpiece. ‘The Genuine Tabard’ will take a lot of beating.

Here then is a body of writing that is not only enjoyable for its own sake but important in literary history. Edmund Clerihew Bentley—whose last book was a ‘shocker’ called Elephant’s Work, published in 1950—bears a heavy responsibility for the course taken by the detective story during what has surely proved its period of greatest glory. It is hardly necessary to add that he bears no responsibility at all for the moronic mixture of sex and sadism that is now masquerading under the ancient and honorable name of detective fiction. Readers who are looking for that kind of thing must go to another shop.

BEN RAY REDMAN

1953