Trent's Last Case

⚖The case for it

Written as parody and ended up founding the Golden Age detective novel. A journalist investigates a tycoon's death and falls in love with the widow, then gets the solution completely wrong. Bentley humanized the detective and introduced fallibility and romance into a form that had been purely mechanical. Every Golden Age writer learned from it.

— the canon

✕The case against

Bentley wrote it as a joke on detective fiction, and the joke requires sitting through a lot of straight-faced Edwardian machinery first: leisurely country-house interviews, a romance with the widow conducted in drawing-room declarations, prose upholstered like the furniture. The famous wrong-solution twist only lands if you cared about the right one, and a century has loosened that grip.

— the honest librarian