Trent's Last Case

Trent’s Last Case (1913) is a detective novel by E.C.Bentley. Adapted three times for the cinema-including a 1952 feature film starring Michael Wilding, Orson Welles, and Margaret Lockwood-Trent’s Last Case, which was titled The Woman in Black in the U.S., earned the acclaim of such writers as Dorothy L.Sayers, and was followed by a sequel and a collection of short stories involving its main character. When Sigsbee Manderson, a prominent American plutocrat, is murdered at his country estate in southwest England, Philip Trent, an amateur detective and freelance journalist, is hired to investigate the case.Aided by police, Trent begins his examination of the facts and evidence.Granted access to the body as well as the grounds of White Gables, Manderson’s estate, Trent concludes his investigation with a series of interviews.Beginning with Manderson’s wife, he uses his journalistic skill to collect information from the plutocrat’s secretaries, servant, and maid, as well as Nathaniel Cupple