Despite its title, Trent's Last Case was actually the first in Bentley's (Edmund Clerihew, 1875-1956) series of detective novels featuring "gentleman sleuth Philip Trent". "The novel," according to the Answers dot com website, "is a whodunit whose unique place in the history of detective fiction is due to the fact that it is at the same time the first major send-up of that very genre: Not only does Trent fall in love with one of the primary suspects (usually considered a no-no) he also, after painstakingly collecting all the evidence, draws all the wrong conclusions."

Oh well, the book is none-the-less cited as one of the truly great early examples of the genre. In addition it's a Haycraft Queen Cornerstone book (ie it was cited in the initial list published in 1942 by Howard Haycraft in his book Murder for Pleasure the definitive list for readers and collectors of detective fiction (the original and an updated list by Ellery Queen are at Detective-fiction dot com).

Covers (green cloth with black titles and rule to front board and black titles and art nouveau decor to lightly sunned spine) have some edgewear and bumped corners. EPs are foxed and have some pencilled notations to FEP. A spilt is starting between the prelims and title page. REP has inked notation, "Read again with delight, June 11th to 15th - 1959" and RPDP has a pencilled notation. Page fore-edges are rough-cut.
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Price: 29.98 GBP