Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Frederick Davidson

Written in 1912 as a light-hearted reaction against the solemnity of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Trent’s Last Case, with its ingeniously twisting plot and cheerfully self-mocking hero, is the first classic of the golden age of English detective fiction.

When a powerful and ruthless American millionaire is found murdered in his English country garden, Philip Trent—English painter, poetry lover, and amateur detective— delves into the crime. He successively uncovers three different, plausible solutions to the murder, and in the process, comes face to face with his own fallibility, in detection and in romance.

“One of the three best detective stories ever written.”—Agatha Christie

E.C. Bentley (1875–1956) was a journalist, novelist, and author of light verse. He wrote first for the Daily News and then for the Daily Telegraph, where he was leader writer and then chief literary critic. Bentley earned a minor place in literary history by his invention of the light-verse form known as the clerihew, and is also known for his contribution to detective fiction. Trent’s Last Case was intended as “an exposure of detective stories,” but was quickly hailed as a classic of the genre.