Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley
Published 1913 · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime
How hard is Trent's Last Case to read?
Trent's Last Case scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- Edwardian literary vocabulary, legal and financial terminology, and elevated register throughout.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Concrete investigation with some reflection on the nature of detection and human fallibility.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Financial detail, investigative reasoning, and social observation create moderate density.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- The novel's central innovation—the detective's solution is wrong—creates retroactive indirection.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The romance and the investigation mirror each other thematically, but Bentley works through plot.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- The novel's entire structure is ironic—the brilliant detective undone by his own human feelings.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- A false resolution is presented, then overturned. The true solution reframes the entire investigation.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- The false-solution structure adds a layer of complexity unusual for its era.
How Trent's Last Case is regarded
Trent's Last Case holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.