E C Bentley

The Woman in Black annotated E C Bentley

The first of a series of detective novels featuring "gentleman sleuth Philip Trent," later published under the title "Trent's Last Case. Before I started reading, I paid no attention to who the author was or when the book was written. So as I was struggling to plow through the author's overblown, overwritten style, I kept thinking, "Who on earth writes like this!" If I had wanted to labor over a text like this, I would have preferred Jane Austin or Tolkien. Then, for some reason, I looked at the copyright and discovered that my assumption that it was a contmporary author was wrong by more than a hundred years!