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Trent Intervenes

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years ago

Bentley, EC - Trent Intervenes (1938)

 

E.C. Bentley's Trent Intervenes is the only collection of stories about Philip Trent. The stories were not collected in book form till 1938, but some of them go back to 1914, one year after the publication of Trent's Last Case (1913), although most of them were first published in 1937 and 1938. Although Bentley's novel is a precursor of the Golden Age, only some of these tales fit Golden Age murder mystery paradigms. Instead, many (8 of the 12 stories) are tales of clever rogues and their crooked schemes. These tales do not entirely fit the paradigms of Rogue Literature either: they are told from the detective's point of view, not that of the rogue's, and are genuine mysteries, with the rogue's behavior explained only at the end of the tale. Still, most of these stories center around clever criminal schemes, and do not involve murder. Among the better such works are "The Vanishing Lawyer" (1937), "The Public Benefactor", and "The Little Mystery" (1938). The late Trent story that is uncollected in Trent Intervenes, "The Ministering Angel" (1938), also deals with ingenious schemes, although this time they are not perpetrated by a rogue, but by a more sympathetic character. A few of the tales are Golden Age, puzzle plot murder mysteries; two of these are the best stories in the collection, "The Sweet Shot" (1937) and "Trent and the Bad Dog" (1937). The plotting style of these latter two works is unbelievably close to Agatha Christie; if they had been published anonymously, I would have attributed them to Christie herself. Christie is on record as regarding Trent's Last Case as one of the three best mysteries of all time, so there is close affinity between the two writers. "The Sweet Shot" is also one of Bentley's few excursions into the technology oriented tales popular among the Realists of his day.

 

Trent does most of his sleuthing by engaging in conversation with members of the working class and lower middle class, and painlessly extracting information from them in passing, about the upper class suspects with whom they have been in innocent contact. These working class characters are usually shown to be nice pleasant people, although occasionally they can be crooked. Trent is suave, smooth and debonair, not to mention exquisitely well mannered and correct, and is intended to be the opposite of the dramatic, eccentric sleuths of other writers. He is a decently behaved upper middle class professional man, who is always polite to the tradesmen with whom he comes into contact. It is a relation that can have all sorts of political meanings read into it: there is almost an economy of information, which flows from the workers to the upper middle class Trent. Trent then analyses the information, generating hypotheses about by whom and how the crime was committed. Trent in turns sends this information on to the police, and to his editors and the public in form of newspaper dispatches (Trent is a working reporter, although infinitely more genteel than the "Front Page" style American reporters of the era. Bentley was a newspaperman himself, specializing in editorials for a well known newspaper of the time.) The passage of information to the police is a well marked out, discrete event in the stories: Trent often writes the police letters summarizing what he has learned, for example. The information chain starts with the working class characters themselves, who are always watching, watching, watching the behavior of upper class bad guys, recording it all. They function almost like a monitor or an error log in a computer program. They also are somewhat like the Chorus in a Greek play. They do not seem to be in a position to do anything with the information they gather about the bad guys, but they record it all.

 

While Trent makes disapproving noises about the rogues' behaviors, sometimes dispensing little sermonettes at the end of the stories, Bentley clearly had considerable sympathy for many of his rogues. The stinging class resentment that animates the villain of "The Public Benefactor" doubtless struck a chord in many of Bentley's readers. The ingenious mystery plot of this tale also serves as a metaphor for full scale class revolt, with the Greek Chorus of working people finally doing something to revolt against the upper classes.

 

Rogue literature in general centers around public desire to tweak the noses of authority figures. Bentley clearly hated doctors, thought lawyers and judges were always rude, condescending, and offensive, and often crooks, and enjoyed mocking the clergy. Bentley also follows another standard pattern of the Rogue school: having his rogues dress in the clothes of the upper classes as part of their plots. The breaking down of class distinctions, with characters moving from one social class to another, forms a key plot pattern in several of the tales: "The Public Benefactor", "The Ordinary Hairpins" (1916). The heroine of "The Clever Cockatoo" (1914) gets better from her illness only when she participates in lower class Italian life, a memorable scene with symbolic overtones. These attitudes are especially noticeable in the earliest stories in the collection, those dating from 1914 - 1916.

 

Bentley saves most of his opprobrium for foreigners, especially Americans, who often turn out to be no good. The early Agatha Christie also had an obsession about Americans. Nor will the "what's-a-matta-you" dialect of the Italian suspect in "Trent and the Bad Dog" endear him to Italian-Americans. Bentley is far more progressive with women's issues; the portrait of the battered wife in "The Sweet Shot" is one of the most important in Golden Age mystery fiction, along with Mary Roberts Rinehart's "Alibi For Isabel".

 

Bentley's creative imagination clearly felt that apartment houses somehow were likely to break out into physical violence, as happens in three of these tales. The violence in two happens on stage, involving the police vs. rogues, and reminds one of thrillers of the John Buchan - Edgar Wallace variety. Buchan was Bentley's publisher, a link between two writers who otherwise do not seem very close artistically. This sort of violence does not happen very often in British Golden Age detective fiction, although John Dickson Carr included such mild thriller elements as part of his finales in novels like Hag's Nook (1933).

 

Bentley's stories are short and to the point, with little excess baggage. But they often come in pairs, with each being a variation on a theme. There are two Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, set in the English countryside; two tales about rogues who wind up battling the police in apartment houses; two tales about people who ingeniously disappear; two tales about scholars assaulted in the countryside; and two tales about English people traveling in the Mediterranean, who suffer from plots trying to convince them that they are going crazy. (This last plot, sans the Mediterranean setting, is a fixture of works like Gaslight. Was Bentley the first to use it, back in 1914? Lots of Bentley stories deal with people who are trapped in bad relationships or lives, and would like to escape.) This doubling allows Bentley to explore new ideas, but which are related to the plot of a previous tale. It also gives the collection as a whole a sort of artistic unity. There are other parallelisms which run orthogonal to these story pairs: there are two stories with mischievous animals, and two tales with courageous young girls who are down on their luck.

 

Bentley liked to make mystery plots out of complex word-play and literary allusions; this works better in "The Old-Fashioned Apache" (1937) than in "The Inoffensive Captain" (1914), but it never achieves a major triumph. One suspects it influenced similar linguistic mannerisms in Dorothy L. Sayers' first collection, Lord Peter Views the Body. Both writers break out in French, for example, Sayers in "The Article in Question". This is not Sayers' finest hour, either. As far as I can tell, no other Golden Age writers took them up on this, and the tradition died out, which is probably just as well. Bentley knew Sayers through their association with the Detection Club, and he wrote a Sayers parody called "Greedy Night". The best parts of this spoof are a series of playful cultural references early on, especially a nice comic bit about a medieval manuscript, but is otherwise ordinary. It does satirically pick up on Sayers' habit of having both the upper classes and intellectuals discuss abstruse subjects in the most frightfully casual language and slang.

 

Actually, given the complex patterns of British Golden Age history, it is hard to tell who influenced whom. Detective historian Sayers was aware of Bentley's magazine stories, for she included two of them in her anthologies, long before Bentley collected them in book form. Also, "The Clever Cockatoo" (1914), a story with a known early date, almost certainly influenced Sayers' "The Man With The Copper Fingers". (These two unpleasant horror stories are among my least favorite of their authors' work.) Similarly, "The Vanishing Lawyer" (1937) takes us into the territory of Freeman Wills Crofts and his followers (Henry Wade, Father Knox) with its ingenious alibis, as does "The Unknown Peer" (1938); it is hard to tell who anticipated whom here, since Bentley had pioneered the use of clever alibis in his novels before Crofts had published a line. Inquiring minds want to know!

 

Mike Grost

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