E.C. Bentley

English · 1875 to 1956

Born Edmund Clerihew Bentley on July 10, 1875, in London, the son of a civil servant who had once played rugby for England, he was sent to St Paul's School, where a lasting friendship with Gilbert Keith Chesterton began. There, at sixteen, while idling through a chemistry lesson, he scrawled a four-line verse about Humphry Davy, and so invented the comic biographical form that would carry his middle name, the clerihew. He went up to Merton College, Oxford, edited the undergraduate paper The Isis, and was president of the Union, then read for the bar before turning to journalism. For years he wrote leaders for the Daily News and later the Daily Telegraph, a steady trade that left little mark on literary history. His mark came from a single book. Trent's Last Case (1913), dedicated to Chesterton, set out partly to mock the infallible detective then in fashion, and gave its investigator a fallible heart and a wrong solution; it quietly remade the genre and is often called the first modern detective novel. He returned to the character decades later in Trent's Own Case (1936), written with H. Warner Allen, and the stories of Trent Intervenes (1938). His verses were gathered in Biography for Beginners (1905), More Biography (1929), and Baseless Biography (1939). He published an autobiography, Those Days, in 1940. He served as president of the Detection Club. Bentley died in London on March 30, 1956, at the age of eighty, his name preserved less by his novels than by a teasing rhyme he had dashed off as a schoolboy.