E. C. Bentley wrote Trent's Last Case (1913), a landmark in the golden age of the English detective novel, that time around World War I when the traditional mystery story flourished. Edmund Clerihew Bentley was born the eldest son of John Edmund Bentley and Margaret Richardson Clerihew in Shepherd's Bush, London, on 10 July 1875. Bentley's autobiographical memoir, Those Days (1940), describes his education at St. Paul's School. There he first met G. K. Chesterton, who was to become the great friend of his life and the formative influence on his detective stories. At Merton College, Oxford (1894-1898), he achieved greater distinction in debate, on the crew, and as president of the Oxford Union than in his formal studies, which he concluded with a second in Greats. His son Nicolas, who grew up to become an artist and writer and to illustrate his father's collections of verse and anthologies of Damon Runyon...