Quotes from book
Trent's Own Case

Trent's Own Case
Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Trent's Own Case is a 1936 British detective novel written by E.C. Bentley as a sequel to his best-known novel Trent's Last Case.The artist and amateur criminologist, Philip Trent, investigates the murder of a sadistic philanthropist whose portrait he had painted. But there are many false paths and blind alleys in the case, and it is not until he has crossed to France and back again and searched England for the champagne Felix Poubelle 1884, not before two others have died and an actress has disappeared, that Trent finally emerges triumphant to discover the murderer.In Trent's Last Case, Philip Trent had fallen in love with one of the chief suspects, the victim's beautiful young widow, Mabel. In Trent's Own Case, they are happily married and have a six-year-old son. The reader gets a glimpse of their marriage in Chapter XV.

“As he went through the half-darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like many another in case like his, was far from grasping fully how bad his luck had been, how little the chance that life had offered. Neglect and harshness had marked him in infancy; there had been nothing at any time to tell against the effect of them. But in all of the past that he remembered and could understand there had been more than enough to be stored up as matter for savage resentment, for the soul-sick criminal's conviction that he owes the world no more than such repayment as he can make in its own coin.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XVII: "Fine Body of Men"

“There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XV: "Eunice Makes a Clean Breast of It"

“That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile — that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XV: "Eunice Makes a Clean Breast of It"

“I know, if anyone does — all research workers know — how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XXI: "Aunt Judith Knits"

“He was less afraid of gentlemen than of most other kinds of men; for instinct told him that, however detestable a gentleman's personal character might be, he was usually not inclined to be censorious or even inquisitive about the conduct of his fellow-creatures.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XVII: "Fine Body of Men"

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