To not recommend ‘the first’ Golden Age Detective Fiction novel, on a show founded upon the tenets of the era, would be sacrilege. Coming in at 11th place for our 2022 recommendations is E.C. Bentley’s ‘Trent’s Last Case’, also published as ‘The Woman in Black’. Released in 1913 as a response to ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ by Bentley’s friend G.K. Chesterton, the novel has been crowned by many with the impossible accolade of starting the Golden Age itself. To juggle the various layers of importance behind ‘Trent’s Last Case’ would, and has, been the subject of many a chapter of Golden Age Detection historiography. The book is a jovial, fondly familiar read, slightly overburdened with the technicalities that the genre’s detractors would come to bemoan. It would take you little imagination to picture how the fibres on this spinning wheel met the loom that would weave the tapestry we celebrate.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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