Trent’s Last Case.

BENTLEY, Edmund C.

$300.00

Item Number: 137405

London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d. [c. 1913].

First edition of Bentley’s groundbreaking detective novel, “one of the three best detective stories ever written” (Agatha Christie). Octavo, original publisher’s cloth with gilt titles to the spine, pictorial endpapers, frontispiece in color. In very good condition. Small bookplate and ownership inscription. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

When a scheming American capitalist is found dead in the garden of his English country house, two immediate matters confound amateur detective Philip Trent: why is the dead man not wearing his false teeth and why is his young widow seemingly relieved at his death? The newly widowed Mabel Manderson, ‘The Lady in Black’, has a disarming effect on the refreshingly fallible and imaginative Trent, in this classic detective story that twists and turns as a result of the irresistible combination of ingenious deductions and misplaced assumptions. G. K. Chesterton, to whom Bentley dedicated the book, referred to it as "the finest detective story of modern times" while Agatha Christie declared it "one of the three best detective stories ever written."