This book tells you two times before you even start reading that there’s something up with it. In the first, we have an introduction written by the lady herself, Dorothy Sayers, describing the immediate resonance and impact this novel had on the genre of mystery writing when it was first published in 1913. She describes how the genre had become stale and through poor stewardship the tropes had becomes cliches. Especially notable is that it became the thing of cheap imitation in pulp publications. She refers backward to the early purveyors — Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Poe, and Doyle — as being artists, and now the genre had given over.
The second thing we get is Bentley’s dedication of the novel to GK Chesterton, also a mystery writer and also a shaker up of things with his brilliant novel The Man Who was Thursday, which I can’t recommend enough.
Previously, I lamented a bad send-up of the detective novel written by Miles Franklin and one of my key issues with spoof and satire is when it fails to makes a compelling version of the thing itself. I like a good parody better than a good satire. This is a good parody, in that, it’s a good mystery novel.
What I like about it too is that it “shakes things up” and results in an interesting novel too. It also previews some of the more interesting changes to come both in the rise of writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, SS Van Dine, etc, but it also previews some of the various tenets of hard-boiled fiction to come after.
I realize I am not saying anything about the mystery itself.
(Photo: http://www.criminalelement.com/re-investigating-trents-last-case-by-ec-bentley-scott-adlerberg/)