Carl Schwartz burst into the living room of the Moon Valley Ranch house with fire in his eye and pathos in his voice: "As sheur as I standing here am, dot schwein I'm going to kill "' "I'll jest bet yer a million dollars ter a piece o' custard pie yer don't," said Bud Morgan, rising from the lounge where he had been resting after a strenuous day in the big pasture. "I'll pet you," shouted Carl. "Der pig pelongs mit me der same as you." "Go ahead, then," said Bud, lying down again. "But I want ter tell yer this, and take it from me, it's ez straight ez an Injun's hair, yer kin kill yer own part o' thet hawg if yer want ter, but if my part dies I'll wallop yer plenty. I've spent too much time teachin' thet pig tricks ter lose it now." "Vich part der pig you own, anyvay?" "Ther best part; ther head.


*Not* the book of the film with Dan Radcliffe (!)

Published in 1913, ahead of the stock market crash, this is the story of the death of an American investor, found shot on beside his garden shed in peculiar circumstances.

We know - or at least think we know - the murderer by the middle of the book and the second part of the book is concerned with proving it and a side dish of love affair.

Lots of talking (and therefore bulks of text), decent police procedural for it's time ( )

Carl Schwartz burst into the living room of the Moon Valley Ranch house with fire in his eye and pathos in his voice: "As sheur as I standing here am, dot schwein I'm going to kill "' "I'll jest bet yer a million dollars ter a piece o' custard pie yer don't," said Bud Morgan, rising from the lounge where he had been resting after a strenuous day in the big pasture. "I'll pet you," shouted Carl. "Der pig pelongs mit me der same as you." "Go ahead, then," said Bud, lying down again. "But I want ter tell yer this, and take it from me, it's ez straight ez an Injun's hair, yer kin kill yer own part o' thet hawg if yer want ter, but if my part dies I'll wallop yer plenty. I've spent too much time teachin' thet pig tricks ter lose it now." "Vich part der pig you own, anyvay?" "Ther best part; ther head.


*Not* the book of the film with Dan Radcliffe (!)

Published in 1913, ahead of the stock market crash, this is the story of the death of an American investor, found shot on beside his garden shed in peculiar circumstances.

We know - or at least think we know - the murderer by the middle of the book and the second part of the book is concerned with proving it and a side dish of love affair.

Lots of talking (and therefore bulks of text), decent police procedural for it's time ( )

Un libro di alti e bassi, con alcune buone trovate alternate a scelte discutibili.
Mi è piaciuto il tono scanzonato ed il fatto che parta con un'impostazione da giallo classico per poi sovvertirne la regola fondamentale, ossia l'infallibilità del detective: qui Philip Trent non ne azzecca una e deve essere guidato passo passo alla soluzione, con un doppio colpo di scena ben congegnato.
Il finale quindi è apprezzabile, ma lo svolgimento lascia molto a desiderare perché è piatto e troppo schematico, non stimola mai la curiosità del lettore. Il difetto peggiore però è la presenza ingombrante della love story tra il protagonista e la moglie della vittima: uno sviluppo di trama superfluo, che non si adatta alla leggerezza e all'ironia del romanzo e che finisce per occupare un posto troppo preponderante nell'intreccio, a discapito del mistero (che già di suo non era esattamente brillante).
Che dire dunque in conclusione? Giallo discreto, che si fa leggere ma non lascia il segno. ( )

This was an ok book, albeit not great. Some financial magnate, Sigsbee Manderson was found shot dead on his estate. One of the newspapers sent off Philip Trent to report on the issue, and also to do a spot of investigating on his own part. He teams up, so to speak with Inspector Murch.

Initially, it appears it might be a case of suicide, but a lot of minor details seem to point otherwise. There seem to be lots of suspects, but none on which one can pin conclusive evidence. In particular, one person who might have been involved is Manderson's spouse, Mable Manderson. For some reason, Trent falls in love with Mable, so he can't finger her for any complicity. Eventually, it all comes out, but the final solution is quite differently from what people imagined, and because Manderson was such a despicable ass hat, no one gets convicted of anything in the end.

I'm not quite sure what my son saw in this book to have him recommend to me. As I said, it was ok, but nothing special. It would be ***-, were GoodReads to allow us s or -s on our ratings.
( )

review of
E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 18-20, 2019

The introduction by writer Dorothy Sayers states "you could have no idea how startlingly original it seemed when it first appeared. It shook the world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence." (p x) I'm inclined to agree that it's an important bk. It was originally copyrighted in 1913. I've only 'recently' become an appreciator of crime fiction, my experience w/ pre-1913 mysteries is limited to Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) & Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) & probably a few other authors that I'm forgetting at the moment. Trent's Last Case added a sense of moral uncertainty that might not've been there before. I liked Bentley's writing from the beginning:

"Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?

"When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honour. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth too shuddered under a blow." - p 3

The dead man's character, & character flaws, are put under exceptional scrutiny:

"Like the poet who died in Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was buried far away from his own land; but for all the men and women of Manderson's people who flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery under the Monte Testaccio, there is not one, nor ever will be, to stand in reverence by the rich man's grave beside the little church of Marlstone." - p 10

"["]To take the Pennsylvania coal hold-up alone, there were thirty-thousand men, with women and children to keep, who would have jumped at the chance of drilling a hole throuhg the man who fixed it so that they must starve or give in to his terms. Thirty thousand of the toughest aliens in the country, Mr. Trent. There's a type of desperado in that kind of push who has been known to lay for a man for years, and kill him when he had forgotten what he did. They have been known to dynamite a man in Idaho who had done them dirt in New Jersey ten years before. Do you suppose the Atlantic is going to stop them?["]" - pp 87-88

Trent has entered the case as a reporter but he's known far & wide for his detective abilities so an unspoken agreement is reached w/ the police:

"The inspector would talk more freely to him than to any one, under the rose, and they would discuss details and possibilities of every case, to their mutual enlightenment. There were necessary rules and limits. It was understood between them that Trent made no journalistic use of any point that could only have come to him from an official source. Each of them, moreover, for the honor and prestige of the instiution he represented, openly reserved the right to withhold from the other any discovery or inspiration that might come to him which he considered vital to the solution of the difficulty." - p 44

I suppose that one of the reasons why people enjoy detective stories is b/c we like to follow the investigator's procedure. Here, we get a little lesson in rigor mortis:

"There are many things that may hasten or retard the cooling of the body. This one was lying in the long dewy grass on the shady side of the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or laboring under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically instantaneously; there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases of injuries to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't hang anybody on rigor mortis nowadays" - p 63

Trent is inspired & instead of attending the inquest he goes off on more obscure paths:

"had there made certain purchases at a chemist's shop, conferred privately for some time with a photographer, sent off a reply-paid telegram, and made an inquiry at the telephone exchange." - p 89

Trent comments on the sameness of hotel rms, showing the homogenization of such things happening as early as 1913:

"["]Have you ever been in this room before, Cupples? I have, hundreds of times. It has pursued me all over England for years. I should feel lost without it if, in some fantastic, far-off hotel, they were to give me some other sitting-room. Look at this table-cover; there is the ink I spilt on it when I had this room in Halifax. I burnt that hole in the carpet when I had it in Ipswich. But I see they have mended the glass over the pciture of "Silent Sympathy," which I threw a boot at in Banbury.["]" - p 112

This bk was copyrighted 106 yrs ago. To people who read a fair amt, like I do, that doesn't seem long ago at all — after all, it was only 40 yrs before I was born. Nonetheless, think about the following:

"[']Do you recognize the powder inside it? You have swallowed pounds of it in your time, I expect. They give it to babies. Grey powder is its ordinary name—mercury and chalk. It is great stuff.[']" - p 113

Now cf that to today's take on the subject:

"Blue mass was used as a specific treatment for syphilis from at least the late 17th century to the early 18th. Blue mass was recommended as a remedy for such widely varied complaints as tuberculosis, constipation, toothache, parasitic infestations, and the pains of childbirth.

"A combination of blue mass and a mixture called the common black draught was a standard cure for constipation in early 19th century England and elsewhere. It was particularly valued on ships of the Royal Navy, where sailors and officers were constrained to eat rock-hard salted beef and pork, old stale biscuits (hardtack), and very little fruit, fiber, or other fresh food once they were at sea for an extended period.

"It was a magistral preparation, compounded by pharmacists themselves based on their own recipes or on one of several widespread recipes. It was sold in the form of blue or gray pills, or syrup. Its name probably derives from the use of blue dye or blue chalk (used as a buffer) in some formulations.

"The ingredients of blue mass varied, as each pharmacist prepared it himself, but they all included mercury in elemental or compound form (often as mercury chloride, also known as calomel). One recipe of the period included (for blue mass syrup):
• 33% mercury (measured by weight)
• 5% licorice
• 25% Althaea (possibly hollyhock or marshmallow)
• 3% glycerol
• 34% rose honey
Blue pills were produced by substituting milk sugar and rose oil for the glycerol and rose honey. pills contained one grain (64.8 milligrams) of mercury.

"Toxicity

"Mercury is known today to be toxic, and ingestion of mercury leads to mercury poisoning, a form of heavy-metal poisoning. While mercury is still used in compound form in some types of medicines and for other purposes, blue mass contained excessive amounts of the metal: a typical daily dose of two or three blue mass pills represented ingestion of more than one hundred times the daily limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States today."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_mass

Imagine all the brain damage & health problems that were caused by giving the stuff to babies! &, yet, drs wd've been pd to recommend it & pharmacists wd've pd to provide it! Now think about the current day: has the situation changed that much? Sure, now mercury's recognized as being toxic — but the death-hold that drs & pharmacists have on the vast majroity of people who're foolish enuf to believe in their priestcraft might very well be stronger than ever.

"'The people,' she said. 'Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must be for anyone who has lived in a world where there was always creative work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor; can you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you have to be rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all—where money is the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody's thoughts—where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work, that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they have any leisure, and the men who don't have to work are even duller than the men who do, and vicious as well[']" - pp 122-123

Yeah, it's called capitalism.

By the by, I read aloud from Trent's Last Case in a movie of mine called Diabetes Type 2. The relevant section is here: https://youtu.be/2GLu66dgpKI?t=3599 .

"So strong had been the influence of the unquestioned assumption that it was Manderson who was present that night, that neither I nor, as far as I know, anyone else had noted the point. Martin had not seen the dead man's face; nor had Mrs. Manderson." - p 135

A similar element is used in Carolyn Wells's The Clue of the Eyelash (1933) so I wonder if Wells was influenced by Bentley. See my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2923714946 .

Anyway, the perpendicularity of my globularistic conditioning is an inherited traitess [pun intended]:

"[']It's just the same when we want to be serious; we mark it by turning to long words. When a solicitor can begin a sentence with, "pursuant to the instructions communicated to our representative," or some such gibberish, he feels that he is earning his six-and-eightpence.[']" - p 179

This is a good bk. Amen. ( )