Dear listeners,

It's Green Penguin Book Club time again! And we have reached the eleventh crime, or green, title in the original Penguin series: Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley.

This book is Penguin 78 and joined the series in January 1937. It was originally published in the UK in 1913.

Here's my copy:

Joining me on the show to discuss this book are Flex and Herds, the Australian broadcasting duo behind the Death of the Reader radio show and podcast. If you haven't already listened to them deconstruct and try to solve classic murder mysteries on air, you have a treat in store for you.

The experience of reading and re-reading Trent's Last Case as I have done over the past couple of years is an interesting one. The Shedunnit Book Club read this book together in March 2024, and in advance of that I did a proper deep dive on it (including watching the somewhat patchy 1952 film adaptation starring Orson Wells). The book zips along with a fun, light tone no doubt drawn partly from E.C. Bentley's other work in journalism and in comic verse. Indeed, the whole conceit of the book — an amateur sleuth's first outing that we know before opening the book will be his "last case" — is humorous.

This is the blurb for the book that was printed on the inside front cover of my edition, which should hopefully give you a sense of what I mean. It's a little bit camp, but with some plot power too:

"Sigsbee Manderson was one of those fabulous beings who control the destiny of millions of their fellow men not by force of arms or political power, but through the immense wealth they so ruthlessly exploit. His name was News, whatever he did. His death, sudden and violent, meant a scoop of the first magnitude which must be followed up at once, as Sir James Molloy, editor of The Record, instantly recognized. To establish why Manderson died - and if possible by whose hand - required qualities of a high order, powers of reportage and detcction beyond the average. Like all good editors Sir James had his man. He knew that Trent, brilliant freelance reporter and investigator, was virtually finished with such assignments, but he also counted on the extraordinary circumstances of the case to lure Trent to the chase. And he did not count in vain. So far, so good. No murder case is easy to solve; some take longer than others on account of the complexity of the circumstances, but here the circumstances seemed altogether lacking. It is true that there were many who would have killed Manderson, if they could. He had enemies enough, but none of them could possibly have been near the scene of death when it occurred. Trent's explanation was ingenious and brilliant. But The Record did not print it, which is just as well - for the real explanation, when it came, was even more extraordinary."

Returning to Trent's Last Case again this year as part of the Green Penguin series, I was particularly struck by how extensively it seems to predict the tropes and motifs that were to become the backbone of the "golden age of detective fiction" a decade later. This book is full of fingerprint clues, red herrings, seemingly unbreakable alibis, a closed circle of suspects who all hated the murder victim, and more. If you told me it was published in 1933 rather than 1913, I would believe you.

It isn't just that this pre-WWI book contains many of the same features that would become popular in the mid 1920s. Bentley goes further: a lot of the time he is parodying these tropes, almost as if he is poking fun at a genre (the puzzle mystery) that doesn't properly exist yet. The other popular crime writers of the 1910s were Arthur Conan Doyle, L.T. Meade, G.K. Chesterton and Baroness Orczy, all of whom wrote mysteries that were more interested in suspense and surprise (or in Chesterton's case, moral philosophy) than they were in the interplay of amateur and professional detective as they hunt for clues. At times when I was reading the book again for this episode, I started entertaining bizarre time travel theories, in which E.C. Bentley had lived through the golden age of detective fiction and then jumped back to write its point of origin after the fact.

Nonsense, of course. There is a much better explanation for why Trent's Last Case feels like a murder mystery time capsule that wasn't opened until the 1920s. I think it reads this way because the principal authors in this genre post WWI were all obsessed with this book — they adored it, studied it closely, and then cherry picked its best bits to develop further their own work.

Agatha Christie called it "one of the three best detective stories ever written". Dorothy L. Sayers said that “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.” Ronald Knox said that “I suppose somebody might write another story as good as Trent’s Last Case, but I have been waiting nearly twenty years for it to happen" and R. Austin Freeman commented that “the literary workmanship is of a quality that must satisfy the most fastidious reader.”

Because the stellar mystery writing careers of Christie and Sayers, if not the others, then went on to eclipse poor old Trent's Last Case, when we come at last to Bentley's book it feels like an oddity, rather than the explosive inspiration that it must have been in 1913. We can get a little sense, I think, of how meaningful this book was to the writers of the golden age of detective fiction from the fact that they insisted that E.C. Bentley take over from G.K. Chesterton as the president of the Detection Club when the latter died in 1936, even up until that year Bentley had only published the one mystery novel. He did follow up Trent's Last Case with Trent's Own Case that same year, 1936, and the Detection Club held a special gala dinner in the book's honour. Few, if any, other works got this treatment, as far as I know.

I hope that if you take this opportunity to spend some time with Trent's Last Case, you are able to enjoy it both as an important moment in detective fiction history and as a silly novel about haphazard sleuth who makes every possible mistake and then some. Because it is both, I believe, and should be appreciated as such.

The next book to get the Green Penguin Book Club treatment will be Penguin 79, The Rasp by Philip MacDonald. Look out for that episode in November!

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).

Dear listeners,

It's no secret that I don't read a lot of contemporary crime fiction. My passion has always been for mysteries from a century ago and now that I have 25 episodes of Shedunnit to make a year, there just isn't that much space in my personal reading schedule for anything that wasn't published during the interwar years. I feel fairly guilty about this, though, because I know there are many excellent writers working today who are doing interesting things with the genre and I'm just completely unaware.

And so, every so often, I make a foray into something that was published more recently. I tend to be fairly impatient with books that are too explicitly trying to reproduce the effects of Agatha Christie (as those blurbs love to trumpet) and I don't always get on with the greats of later twentieth century crime writing (I very much enjoyed all of your sympathetic emails in response to my recent dispatch that mentioned my inability to "get" the work of P.D. James, for instance).

These efforts to be a little up to date in my reading are not always unsuccessful, though, and I want to share with you today three (relatively) recently published crime novels that I really enjoyed.

The Botanist's Assistant by Peggy Townsend

I picked this book on a whim from the many, many press releases I get sent by publishers, because there was something about the description of the protagonist — a talented, middle-aged botanist who lives alone in a small cabin in the woods and ends up solving her boss's murder — that spoke to me. I'm very glad I did, because I devoured this book within 24 hours and found it to be very well written and plotted. I did get an advance copy of it, though, and I'm afraid it's not on general release until 18th November. If you are curious, do consider giving the book a pre-order, adding it to your wishlist on your reading-tracking platform of choice, or requesting it at your library (all are good ways of supporting writers you would like to see keep on writing).

Margaret Finch is an oddball and a misfit who lives entirely according to her own habits, drives an ancient truck, and makes her own soap. She likes things just so, in a way that might be interpreted as being neurodiverse-adjacent, but which plays out via character description rather than a diagnosis being part of the plot. Margaret works as a research assistant in a lab where plant extracts are being used to make medical breakthroughs, until one day her boss, a charismatic and well-known scientist, is found dead in his office. Considered a suspect by the police and determined to carry on their research, Margaret teams up with the building's new janitor (a former investigative journalist) to solve the case. Her awkward personality traits, for which she has often been teased or bullied, turn out to be an asset when it comes to tracking down a murderer.

Publishing loves to describe books in the format X + Y = Z, and for this one I think that equation would be Lessons in Chemistry + the Ruth Galloway series = The Botanist's Assistant.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

This 2022 thriller is in some ways quite a conventional work of domestic noir, set in northern England with the mother of a teenage son as the protagonist. Right at the beginning, events come to a head when her son stabs a man one night outside their house — an act that is completely at odds with her previous knowledge of her child. After an exhausting night at the police station, she wakes up the next morning and finds that it is... the day before the crime. And this keeps happening, with her skipping backwards through time. She decides that this is happening so that she can solve her son's crime before he commits it, and it turns into quite an interesting reflection on cause and effect.

I like how many authors these days seem to be asking the question "but what if I added time travel?" and then running with the answer. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton does this with a mashup of historical crime fiction and science fiction, and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston plays with it for romance. Genre is a construct anyway, so I'm glad we're seeing more mainstream experimentation around it.

The Secret Place by Tana French

This is the book that the Shedunnit Book Club read last November, for the one month a year where we read a work of contemporary (as opposed to classic or golden age) crime fiction. Members can listen to a two part podcast episode about this book now, if they haven't already heard it. This is an Irish crime novel from 2015 about a group of teenage girls at an upscale Dublin boarding school and how they fare after a lad from the corresponding boys' school is found dead in their grounds.

The overlapping chronologies, the highly specific noughties fashion and slang, the hint of the unexplained, the clique-y friendships... It feels wrong to say that a book with some dark elements was a "joy" to read, but it was. To my mind, this is Miss Pym Disposes for the twenty-first century. Given that I have had Tana on Shedunnit to talk about how much she loves Josephine Tey, that comparison feels especially apt. This was a divisive read among book club members, many of whom did not enjoy this book's deviation from strict crime fiction conventions. That was what I liked best about it, though, and I'm certainly planning to read more Tana French next time I have the time and appetite for a book from the 2020s rather than the 1920s.

I hope that gives you a little insight into my reading taste beyond the chronological boundaries of Shedunnit. If you would like more regular updates on everything I read, that is available via my personal newsletter. You can also follow me on the Storygraph if that's your sort of thing.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).

Dear listeners,

Are you the kind of reader who likes to solve the mystery as you read, racing the detective to the solution, or do you prefer to spectate and allow the author to lay out the resolution for you? Personally, I flip between these two styles: there are some books that bring out my competitive edge and others that I like to revel in without constantly thinking about clues and red herrings. I'm also an enthusiastic re-reader of mysteries, because finding out whodunnit is only one part of the pleasure this genre gives me.

When I am reading in the former mode, I do like to know that my reasoning was right when I reach the end. Of course this can be achieved by going through the book again — and I have done this with Agatha Christie's novels in particular, trying to spot the moment when she successfully pulled the wool over my eyes — but some books contain footnotes or a special appendix that makes this checking easy. The latter can take the form of a "cluefinder": an index of clues with the page reference for where each one can be found so that the reader can verify their own hypothesis and see how the writer laid their traps. I can't show you a picture of one without completely spoiling the novel to which it belongs, but I hope my description is adequate to give you a general idea if you haven't encountered one in the wild yet.

The cluefinder was never a requirement for publishing a whodunnit during the golden age of detective fiction. Books that had them were in the minority, and the ones that did tended not to be the big hits by the likes of Christie or Sayers. But I've come across enough of them over the years to be curious about why they were included and how they are constructed. And so when Martin Edwards' new novel landed on my desk earlier this summer and I saw that, despite being a work of contemporary crime fiction due to be published in autumn 2025, it had a cluefinder, I had to know more.

Martin has been a frequent guest on Shedunnit over the years and had contributed greatly to the show with his deep historical knowledge of golden age detective fiction (you might like to check out his episodes about the Detection Club or The Poisoned Chocolates Case to name just two). It was a nice change, though, to talk about his own fiction-writing process and learn how he marries his interest in all things golden age with the demands of publishing novels for the twenty-first century reader.

The cluefinder proved to be the perfect motif for our discussion: it's a niche curiosity that is very much of the interwar period which has proved surprisingly popular with the modern reader as more people have become interested in the kind of novel that plays fair and allows them to play along. Martin's new book, Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, is set now and is full of the trappings of modern life (including a very funny author character who, I'm told, might have been a little inspired by his creator's own experiences in the publishing industry) but it's also stuffed with tropes and ideas that seasoned readers of golden age detective fiction will recognise with glee. And don't worry, this episode doesn't spoil anything — you can listen to it and then still fully enjoy Miss Winter's twists.

If you would like to try a golden age novel that contains a cluefinder, I would recommend keeping an eye out for one of the following titles:

• The Ten Teacups by Carter Dickson
• The Eye in the Museum by J.J. Connington
• The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
• Obelists Fly High by C. Daly King
• She Had to Have Gas by Rupert Penny

Any one of those should scratch the itch! I wish you the best of luck in spotting the clues and then confirming that you were right all along.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).