Trent's Last Case Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 11)

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Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley, Penguin 78.

This book was first published in 1913 and then added to the Penguin series in January 1937. When it first appeared, before the First World War, there was no such thing as the "golden age of detective fiction" and the puzzle-based mysteries that were to dominate the crime fiction of the interwar years were still in the far off future. And yet Trent's Last Case comes with an impeccable golden age pedigree, almost as if it is commenting on a literary movement that didn't yet exist. Many of the tropes and motifs that we now think of as standard come together for the first time in this book. But Trent's Last Case goes further, providing a comic send up of aspects like the relationship between an amateur and professional detective, a sleuth's predilection for falling in love with the prime suspect, and a hero's ability to jump to the wrong conclusions. When reading it, I constantly had to remind myself that the character of Philip Trent — artist, journalist, and now amateur sleuth — was created at least a decade before the likes of Albert Campion and Peter Wimsey, not after.

As if to hammer home its place in the canon of crime fiction, Trent's Last Case is dedicated to Bentley's school friend G.K. Chesterton, who was the first president of the Detection Club. A number of members of that august institution also heaped praise upon the book. 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.” This is a detective novelists' novel. It's not hard to understand why Bentley was invited to join the Detection Club in 1936, even though his entire lifetime output of detective fiction was limited to two novels — Trent's Last Case and its sequel Trent's Own Case — and a volume of short stories. Bentley did get to see this book adapted three times for the big screen, though, in 1920, 1929, and 1952. The latter starred Orson Welles as the murdered financier whose death Trent investigates.

E.C. Bentley was primarily a journalist and a poet. After graduating from Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century, Bentley worked on Fleet Street — a background that is very much in evidence in Trent's Last Case. He wrote for the Daily News and the Daily Telegraph, among other publications, and popularised a poetic form that he had invented while at school and named after his middle name, Clerihew. A clerihew is a four-line biographical verse in two rhyming couplets where the name of its subject takes up the entire first line. One of Bentley's earliest ones was written about the chemist Humphry Davy, and reads:

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium

The form was popularised by Bentley's first published book of poetry, Biography for Beginners, which came out in 1905. His knack for whimsey, absurdity and a pithy comic line all fed into Trent's Last Case. It is worth remembering that the world of detective fiction into which Trent's Last Case appeared in 1913 was one dominated by Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, as well as the rather more lurid detective-thriller stories written by the likes of L.T. Meade, Baroness Orczy and Edgar Jepson. The quick-witted prose and rapid-fire plotting of E.C. Bentley makes quite a contrast and it's easy to see why the golden age authors who came along a decade or so later loved this book so much.

Joining me to discuss Trent's Last Case are Flex and Herds, a crime fiction broadcasting duo from Australia. Their show, The Death of the Reader on the 2SER radio station in Sydney, has seen them read and try to solve classic crime novels from all over the world. It's also available as a podcast and I would strongly recommend looking up their episodes about Trent's Last Case once you have finished listening here.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest or guests in this case to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Flex and Herds give this one and why.

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Can I ask to start off with, what did you know about Trent's Last Case before you actually read it? Had it crossed your radar in any other form?

Flex: I think this was my turn to pick a book for the show. And the way that on Death of the Reader we typically format things is that one of us will go away, read the whole way through a book, and then sort of be the guide, the devil on the shoulder as the other attempts to solve it and, mislead one another as we go.

And this had all come out of a discussion with Martin Edwards where we were talking in preparation to cover his novel, Blackstone Fell, which is wonderful by the way. He brought up Trent's Last Case as one of the candidates for the first golden age novel, as nebulous as that specific thing may be. Once I had heard that, I was like I have to see it for myself. So I challenged Herds to solve it on the show, and it was such a good time. As Martin put it, he said it was a very agreeable book and I couldn't pick a better term myself.

Caroline: How about you Herds?

Herds: Oh, yes. As evidenced by the history there, the history story of Death of the Reader, this was Flex throwing something at me that I was not truly prepared for. Much in the face of the rules of Ronald Knox, of course. And I seem to recall that I walked away with two out of the three available points. One of which of those points you get basically for showing up. So I don't think I did very well at solving that one.

Flex: I recall saying that they were the most delicious points, two points they could be.

Herds: Yes. They were a delicious buffet, but I think maybe not as well portioned as I would've liked. It wasn't quite the three points I could ask for. But yeah, that, that was in fact my first introduction.

Obviously we do a lot of research to put into the show, and it seems that Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and obviously Martin Edwards during that interview have all sung its praises, so it's quite the well traveled piece of fiction.

Flex: I think we had just come from Whose Body? as well, which Dorothy L. Sayers I think mentions the book in the text from memory?

Herds: She does. Yeah. Dorothy L. Sayers does in fact reference Trent's Last Case, I think she, she says that it's got a bit of a neat solution, but it's been a while since I've visited that one.

Flex: Because there was also that whole thing about how Trent is a very personable detective compared to so many of his contemporaries, and I feel that Peter Wimsey is very much in the same camp of flirtatious fun and you can see the school of thought about the detective going between those two books there.

Caroline: Definitely. Yeah. The image that comes to mind for me is if Trent's Last Case was a kind of comet speeding through the sky, everyone else is in its tail. You can see its impression from the path that it's left in definitely in that book and in lots of others as well.

But what's interesting to me is that there's quite a gap, and I guess maybe that's the gap is the first World War. This book comes out in 1912 and then we don't get Whose Body?, Agatha Christie, all the rest of it until, 1920s and after. So people were reading and thinking about it for quite a long time before they acted on it. So once you got stuck into reading it and researching it, what kind of first impression did it make on you?

Herds: I recall thinking that there's a lot of talking. I look, we get, there's a lot of chapters that we spend talking and seeing the inner workings of Trent's mind. Obviously there's the introduction where we are talking about the ethics crimes of being a capitalist, which is, that's a strong impression.

Flex: Very much in the fashion that Ronald Knox would go on to champion with The Three Taps, which I treasure.

Herds: Yeah. Yeah, it's very similar, but in the way that we actually investigate the crime, we spend a lot of time following Trent, making deductions, but not necessarily telling us what those deductions are. There's a lot of passages where we say, ah, yes we were in an interview with the suspect and we watch Trent as he makes a particular inquiry that the policeman cannot quite discern the intent of. And so we don't really get into what explicitly is going on until very far into the case, by which point we are given a letter that seemingly spells everything out for us. It's almost abrupt in its appearance.

Flex: One of the things that's really interesting about what you're saying there Herds too, is that as we're going through all of the initial evidence, E.C. Bentley is very determined to try and give a foothold for every bit of description he's doing. Like when he first describes the house of the victim, Sigsbee Manderson, he justifies it by having Trent be sketching out the layouts of the room at the same time.

Whenever we're looking at certain pieces of evidence, it's because Philip Trent is actually leaning down and running his eye over it in a way that is very tangible to the story because it's portrayed almost as though he's painting it in his mind because Trent is a painter.

Herds: A painter and a journalist, of course.

Flex: An unwitting one at that.

Caroline: As a former journalist myself, that's one of the things I really treasure about this book is the insight into how journalism worked in 1911, 1912. E.C. Bentley, of course, worked on Fleet Street himself, so I like to think it was all straight from the horse's mouth.

Flex: Yeah, because I think from Martin Edwards' historiography, I think he recounted that Trent basically cooked up this story on his walk to and from work each day. And that's how it managed to fit into his day job was that this was his distraction walking to-and-fro from Fleet Street.

Caroline: It's something I look out for across classic crime are little journalist tidbits and this is a great source of them because yes, Trent again, and I'm probably going to say this all the time throughout this conversation, something that then recurs in lots of other golden age books is this idea that Trent gets himself a foothold in the investigation under the auspices of reporting on it.

He gets himself made a special correspondent or whatever, and that's the explanation for so many amateurs to have the legitimacy to investigate things is, oh I'm doing it for the Express or whatever. I'm not just some nosy random, I'm actually a person with the legitimate reason to be asking you questions and invading your home. So yeah, just one of very, very many things that I think you can point to for this book as originating.

Flex: Yeah, and also the fact that Trent as our journalist, amateur detective is paired up with Inspector Murch who's an ally and rival of his from Scotland Yard, and it's so interesting seeing their dynamic compared to how that trope came to and still is to this day.

Caroline: As a duo they're not fully formed. They haven't quite got the kind of pitter-patter of a Poirot and Japp or something. But you can see it in embryonic form. You can see the rivalry and the desire to withhold, for the amateur to get there first, all of that.

Flex: Yeah the words like detective sportsmanship or something like that uttered in the first chapter that Murch appears and it's, alright, we're right on the nose with this one.

— We are now entering the SPOILER ZONE. —

Herds: There's a few interesting themes that run through the whole book and that sportsmanship runs from the detective to the policeman, Murch, all the way to the very last page of the book. The idea that this story, though it is dealing with murder, of course as all these murder mystery stories are. We're dealing with a game. We're dealing with something that has rules, even if they're unspoken.

Flex: I think something else that the two of you have caught onto there that I really love about this book is part of, to me why it seems this has had such a long historical foothold is also because so many of these character relationships, as you mentioned, Caroline, not quite fleshed out enough in a way that makes them almost cold reading to compare to modern books.

Like the fact that the journalist and the detective have a relationship is noteworthy in this book because it was early in that trope, but the way that we see, like I've been reading Matthew Spencer's new book, Broke Road, and his characters detective Rose Riley and Adam Bowman, the journalist, don't get along at all.

There was a suspicion in the first book that Adam was actually the killer and he's just a mess. But as you also mentioned with Japp, there's still that history of comradery and the way that E.C. Bentley has wedged himself into history with all of these different character dynamics where they're really nice, they're fun, they're good to read, but also they're not quite deep enough to have a certain opinion in some ways makes its historical reference point that much stronger for how insubstantive some of the qualities are.

Caroline: I think that's a really good point that I think Trent's Last Case makes sense as this really important historical origin point, with hindsight. I think it needed. Knox, Sayers, Christie, everyone else, to see these things in it and then take them forward and then reading backwards through Whose Body?, Three Taps, to Trent's Last Case we're like, oh, there it is wonderful, we've seen the first version of this, but actually if literary taste in history had taken another direction, I think this would be a sort of weird novel that nobody reads. Because as you say, it doesn't do any of these things perfectly and brilliantly.

It just plants the seed that other people then cultivated. One of those which is really important that I wanted to ask both of you about is Trent's abilities as a detective, because he's not the best at it. Even as slightly bumbling amateurs go, he's not that skilled. Would you agree with that?

Herds: He thinks he's smart though. He thinks he's good at it. He's his flaw. That's the thing that makes rereading the novel interesting. That he feels as though he's sitting in the corner. He is sketching everybody with his eyes and he is putting the pieces together, but he's really only seeing the surface layer of the story. He doesn't see the person right next to him that is not lying. I was going to say, lying to his face, not technically true, but omitting the story.

Flex: Yeah, specifically I think admitting that he's lying, but insisting that he's not at in the same sentence.

Caroline: Yeah, that classic golden age trope, the withholding of truth, just about squeaking through on the grounds of fair play is didn't lie technically, but also just didn't tell you or show you everything.

Flex: There's also such a wonderful trend through this book of Philip Trent saying exactly what's happening in an extremely roundabout way in the efforts to convince himself that it is not happening and being wrong.

Caroline: Yeah, him being wrong I think is one of the great themes of the book. It speaks to the title that, by the end of the book, he's no, last case I've, I failed. I'm bad at this. So yeah I think that's another really interesting point that obviously other people picked up and ran with this idea that your detective doesn't have to be a kind of infallible God in the manner of Sherlock Holmes.

He can be quite human and quite silly in, in lots of ways. Speaking to another point that I think really marks this book out as a moment in history, is some of the specific techniques that we see Trent use. So you mentioned his drawing of the map. Maps of course and plans very important to later detective fiction. But on rereading the book for this conversation, I was struck by, there's a really long, multi-page description of how to take fingerprints and why that might be important. I wondered if any of those little moments had struck you.

Flex: My favourite one far and is when he gets annoyed at the local doctor for trying to pick a culprit based on rigor mortis. Like that, trope is still with us and in 1913, E.C. Bentley was already fed up with it.

Caroline: Yes. The unreliability of medical evidence. Absolutely. There's a few other things that are in Trent's Last Case that I think you then encounter forever afterwards that I'd love to get your thoughts on. One of them is this idea of the detective falling in love with someone from the case and then that really influencing their...

Flex: Herds, we're in your department.

Herds: Let me tell you about love. Okay? Love and murder mystery. Rule number one of murder mysteries is that the detective should not become involved with anybody who is a suspect or could be a suspect or maybe an accomplice to a suspect, especially not romantically, and should especially not describe anyone's eyebrows as being particularly attractive. There's a whole, there's multiple passages in this book.

Flex: Yeah, what was the line? The length of poetry you have to write, so about someone's eyebrows is like directly proportional to how attractive those eyebrows are?

Herds: That sounds right.

Flex: You just read that and you're like did, would anyone ever in history ever say that sentence, unironically?

Caroline: Yes, because Trent, of course, is falling in love with the victim's wife. An important suspect. If not suspect, then a very important motive, right from the start. She's the motive and the way into the case for him, so yeah, sorry, Herds, continue.

Herds: They say that if you're looking for a motive in a murder mystery, you look for money or love. In this case, I think both play into the characters of the various criminals in this book. Mabel is, she doesn't do much like physically except for sit there and look pretty, but she's the motivator for all of the major actors in this story to carry out crimes, to commit murder, to hide information.

And Trent, because, and this is going back to the discussion about like his foibles, his flaws. One of them is that when he is in love with Mabel and he trusts his good friends around him, he's blind to the truth that they're hiding from him. And he can't see past his emotional attachments.

I wonder if this is a journalist thing, but that's a big part of the love story of this book, that he does fall in love with Mabel. And as far as we're concerned, they live happily ever after.

Flex: I also think one of the things that makes this book so good to still go back and read in the modern day is how differently Mabel is portrayed in first and third person. When people are talking about Mabel, they're like, oh, I have this opinion about her, she wouldn't take any dispute upon her honour because of her family name and oh, she's a woman. She's infatuated with pretty things like all of those women are. But then when it actually comes down to Philip Trent professing his love, she's: Shut up. You cringe lord. Stop. This is too much.

Herds: Yeah.

Caroline: Yeah, that's very true actually. She's maybe one of the few characters in this book who gets that contrast, that what everybody thinks about her and what she actually is capable of herself. Those two things don't match up at all.

Flex: Unlike poor Celestine, the French maid who gets an entire rant in French, that every time I go back to attempt to translate it for myself, I'm like, why is this here? Why for art thou hitting on the French maid, Philip Trent?

Caroline: We might say that's something else that Dorothy L. Sayers took from this book was the the habit of quoting in other languages and not explaining herself.

Flex: Yeah.

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Caroline: Another aspect which again, I picked up from your discussion of this is there is some gesture towards what, in my head I call train timetable stuff, which is the sort of Freeman Wills Crofts, perfect alibi, humdrum obsession with when exactly did he get on the boat? Could he have got back in time? What if he got this other boat? That kind of thing.

Herds: How many boats are there?

Caroline: Yeah. It's not the dominant force in this book, but it is there in the background. There is a whole section where it's when did he get sent to the port? What ticket did he have? And Trent does go into that for a while before dropping it and moving on to a different kind of investigation.

Flex: I'm feeling a wave of nostalgia right now because I think this might have been the point in the run of the show where Herds began to actively bemoan train timetable puzzles because of this book. And I have such a warm place in my heart for the rage he feels about that.

Caroline: Tell us about your rage. Why? Why does this make you see red?

Herds: Look the thing is, I love talking about characters and tropes and significant pieces of evidence that could be revealed with a dramatic flare. Sometimes that can be a train ticket. More often than not, when I'm solving a murder mystery and there's a train puzzle, I had to sit down and do a maths equation.

I don't wanna do that. That's undue scientific procedures. Knox is eighth, I think. It's just a bad time. It's boring. I don't like it. I'm sorry.

Flex: I also think it is down to that sense of intellectual purity that you were saying where we're so determined that there has to be one solution that must be correct because the audience has to see it as fair that a story that otherwise has this great, interesting emotional narrative just gets completely sidelined by maths.

The one time I have absolutely loved this was Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X, where a friend who is much cleverer with mathematics than I am read it, and was telling me about how annoying the portrayal of maths was in the book, I suddenly had the realization that it was even better than I originally thought it was, because the ways that it was dumb said something about the characters. And that's what so many books miss when they try and do timetable puzzles.

Caroline: Yeah. Maths for maths' sake rather than maths to reveal something deeper. No, I completely agree with that. It's why I'm not a huge adherent of the really overly elaborate, impossible crime stuff because it does just feel like technicality alone. It doesn't tell you anything else.

Flex: At the same time though, and I think I got this from you, Caroline, the idea of the murder mystery as an alternative to the crossword puzzle is buoyed by that idea where, you know, next to the crossword puzzle you'll have the maths puzzles. And I think for the sort of audience who engages with murder mystery in that way, there is still enough of an appetite about it that I am not mad, it's not my favourite, but I do still see the role for it.

Caroline: I think it does okay in this book where as Herds says, it's there for a bit and then it goes away. It's one line of investigation.

Herds: Here's the thing. If you're the kind of person who enjoys those puzzles and solving them more power to you. It's great. And it doesn't actually factor into the solution of this book by the end, but if you wanna engage in that. Go for it. Go nuts. But as Flex has already intuited here, it is always going to be the way in which you frame these sorts of puzzles because if our detective is a train enthusiast and we're doing a train puzzle and they're going to explain it to me through an interesting metaphor or a personal experience, I might actually enjoy a train puzzle.

I haven't seen that happen yet, but I might. But yeah, it's all in, it's always down to how you friend these sorts of puzzles as to whether or not I'll find them interesting. In this book, we can hand wave it, we can move on.

Flex: That's the other tight rope that authors have to walk a little bit to is that when you are doing a technically complex puzzle for the audience, who doesn't want to engage in the specifics of the puzzle, you need to thread a needle on being able to say you know that this is a cover for something else, and all you have to figure out is what it's a cover for.

You don't need to do the maths. You just need to tell me why this roadblock is here. And I think that's one of the things that this book does get very correct.

Caroline: Yes, you're absolutely right that all of the train, boat technicality stuff turns out to be part of an interesting psychological subplot, right? It's all part of the murder victim doing something that then feeds into the real explanation of why he's dead. So yeah, I guess we could say that Bentley is not doing a Freeman Wills Crofts.

He is putting that stuff at the service of some deeper character work. But your reference to the rules there, her brings me nicely onto something I wanted you two to assess is, do you feel like Trent's Last Case plays fair?

Flex: When we initially discussed it, we said yes, but going back and reading it again. I'm almost hesitant to to change my judgment because it's not that it's unfair in that, you could tie the rules around it and all that sort of stuff, but there's particular things like one clue very early on that's presented is that Philip Trent notices something about the victim's shoes, and then way towards the end of the story, it's okay, cool now I'm going to explain to you how shoe leather works. And it's not the only way you could get that clue, but it's a good example of the type of thing that just, you know, sure, the audience was presented with something that the detective lighted on as he noticed it, which is in Knox's fair play rules. But it's a bit like if Miss Marple was to give her signature glances and then we'd cut to black. And it's wait, what's she looking at? That's the key part that I need to know.

Caroline: Yeah, Herds?

Herds: Yeah, I remember our discussion around fairness being very wishy-washy because I was trying to get points out of you, and I did. I wasn't successful. I was trying to get points for the show, and I was very bad at it at the time. I feel like it is fair enough in that the actual murderer is presented to us so early on.

And if you go back with the fine tooth comb of no explicit lies being told by that character, you can see a very consistent pattern. I do think that it relies on you knowing the tropes a bit more. And that's something that we even talked about in our previous discussion where you have this letter that seemingly lays out the entire plot, but it's in like chapter 11 out of 18 that this letter comes about, that Trent lays out his final theory. I've been putting quotation marks up for those who can't see me because he's wrong. That's the whole point.

I feel like it is decently fair, I think that the thread is there all the way through, although I do also feel like the actual culprit doesn't do enough in the story to really give you a lot of evidence to work with. I feel like you have to be a particularly perceptive person in terms of character and tropes to kind of see through that.

Flex: I do have one other thing about the fair play of this story, and I think that you've led into it there Herds with the fact that there are multiple solutions. The first solutions are more fair than the latter ones, but the latter ones also have more foreshadowing in this weird reverse situation that makes it read really well.

The thing I think is particularly unfair about this novel, and I know that this is a useless argument to make, is that the only evidence we actually have of the true solution at the end of the story is the word of the guy who did it confessing to it when the entire time along, from the first solution, we've been finding out that the guy who confessed to it initially was wrong, which suggests that the latter guy could also be wrong.

He could also be lying, and that's fun. That's a good thing. But from a strictly is this novel fair perspective, when we get to the end and we're given supposedly the solution, I'm a bit like, I don't believe you.

Caroline: That's my feeling is that he gets halfway in the sense that he shows you the wrong interpretation and all of the evidence for it, but then he doesn't show you any evidence for the right interpretation other than, as you say, this confession. And it happens right at the very end of the book, and we're just supposed to go oh, the end, without.

Herds: Oh, how clever.

Caroline: Asking any further questions. So I think it's yet another example of what you were saying at the start, that this is a, an attempt, not the best attempt at the whole idea of a multiple solution mystery, of a last minute reveal. And then writers like Anthony Berkeley, Christianna Brand, would take this on and perfect it in books like Death of Jezebel or The Poisoned Chocolates Case, they would do it much better where you would actually have multiple narrative strands that were susceptible to two different interpretations all the way through. He's trying it, but he's not quite getting there. Would you say that's fair?

Herds: There's not a proper conclusion, right? As Martin Edwards, said we tighten the last screw in the plot, we reveal the solution, and then Trent makes a quip about buying someone dinner. And then that's the end of the book. There is no unpacking of the true meaning.

Flex: It is very evocative.

Herds: It's great. Look, I love it. I love that it was all foreshadowed. Now we know at the very end why this is Trent's Last Case. It's not just because he's getting married now, it's because he was a fool the whole time. That's the final reveal.

But we also don't get to really sit with the characters and unpack what it all means and what's going to happen. Like nobody hangs, nothing really concrete occurs, was just supposed to sit with, oh, Trent was an idiot, so let's go and do something else now.

Flex: Yeah, which does sit very well in the role of the story as being like a parody, right? Like the fact that it has a bit of a false ending and then its true ending is equally as false, is part of the jest that is going on. I think in particular, there's a certain extent where I can't tie this specifically to G.K. Chesterton's writing, but this story was written to G.K. Chesterton in response to The Man Who Was Thursday and it smells of the same sort of evocative silliness when Father Brown is paddling away from this weird, almost otherworldly thing where it didn't quite wrap up tidily, but it was great nonetheless.

Caroline: Yeah I think that makes sense to me. It is just reading it from, the perspective of a century and more later, having read all of what came after it is just mind boggling to me still that this important origin point for a whole genre is a parody of said genre before it even existed. That feels like some kind of time loop literary theory stuff that I'm not equipped to fully understand.

Flex: Yes. The person I went to to ask that exact question was Martin Edwards, and I dare not try and misquote him here. But it is that sort of adventurous spirit of trying to do something different, trying to break the rules that I think has led to so much innovation. The example I brought up at the time was Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, where basically Isaac Asimov was told that detective fiction and science fiction cannot go together.

And he said, okay,

Caroline: Watch me.

Flex: Here's my book.

Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. I think that brings us nicely onto the traditional final question of these conversations, which is how many green penguins out of five do you want to give this book and why?

Flex: I guess the question I have to ask you is, I know how many stars I gave this book out of five, but what is the spirit of a green penguin to you in this question?

Caroline: Good question, which no one has asked before, but I do have something in mind, which is what I mean by green penguin and why it's green penguin and not star, is that how well suited is it to the reader who collects green penguins, who reads all of this stuff, who is very immersed in the kind of book that they put in that series, if that makes sense.

So we're we are not grading it on a universal scale. This is a specific one.

Flex: This is good. This is good. Herds, I'll let you answer. I'll let you answer this one first.

Herds: Here's the thing. I'm a generous soul and I feel like this story, what it lacks in a proper ending and evidence for its dubious claims., it makes up for with a important historical context. I think I'm going to go with a 4.5.

Flex: Is this a decapitated penguin or like a bifurcated penguin?

Herds: Yes. I think it's like the top half of a penguin, because that's the part that you more like to see.

Flex: So it's still got, it's still got wings?

Herds: Yeah, you can still flap around. It's just like a small penguin.

Flex: I'm going to give a long wishy-washy, convoluted answer here, but I'll give you a proper number at the end, and that's to say that if you have a bookshelf with limited space on it and you are collecting green penguin books, when you are down to one space left to put a book on that shelf, this is the book, five out of five Penguins, get it, read it, must have. But I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to set aside time on your journey to read this one because it's coming back to it when you have something to bring to it that this book is most special and I think that it'd be a three star experience if this was your first detective fiction book because it's not that special in and of itself unless you were absent of the context that made it so impactful. So my final boring answer is four, because that's between three and five.

Herds: Throw 'em out. Throw 'em out. We said this is for a collector of green penguin books. They know what they're getting into.

Flex: But I think that most people listening to this show you at home, this is a five star for you, but not yet.

Herds: Okay.

Caroline: That I, that's a really interesting perspective, I think, I think I agree with that, honestly, that I can't imagine what it would've been like to read this book cold in 1913. I think I would've found it confusing, possibly annoying, and maybe would've just gone back to reading G.K. Chesterton instead, but reading it in say, 1939. Totally different. And of course in 2025 we have the benefit of all of that and more. So yeah, I think that's a really valuable point. But thank you very much Flex and Herds for reading Trent's Last Case with me and considering it. And I hope people will now go and check out if they haven't already your conversation about it on Death of the Reader, which I think is a very valuable companion to what we've done here today.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Many thanks to my guests, Flex and Herds. Be sure to check out their show, Death of the Reader, which is available from 2SER in Sydney and in all good podcast apps.

You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/trentslastcase. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to ensure the podcast's continued existence and get some extra audio goodies in the bargain, become a paying supporter now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.