Books: Enigma

ELEPHANT’S WORK (277 pp.)—E C. Bentley—Knopf ($2.75).

If the judgment of his peers can. be trusted, Englishman Edmund Clerihew* Bentley wrote one of the best detective stories of the 20th Century. G. K. Chesterton flatly named Trent’s Last Case (1913) “the finest detective story of modern times.” Agatha Christie calls it “one of the three best detective stories ever written.” Bentley himself put another book at the top of his list: John Buchan’s hare & hounds thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps. He said as much to Author Buchan one day, and Buchan replied: “Why don’t you write a shocker yourself? It’s twenty times easier than writing a detective story, like Trent’s Last Case”

It wasn’t, at least not for E. C. Bentley. Elephant’s Work is written as smoothly as whipped cream, and it is not a jot more thrilling that a session with a charlotte russe.

The book starts promisingly enough when an enraged elephant on an English circus train flails about with its trunk in the cab of a nearby locomotive and sends a passenger train off on a wild, wreck-climaxed run. Just before the crash, a U.S. gangster type slips his revolver and forged passport into the raincoat of a quiet Englishman; from there to the end, everything is as generally predictable as hot weather in August. When the amnesia-fogged Englishman turns out to be a bishop mistaken for a killer, only the most cooperative thriller fan will stir in his hammock.

Author Bentley’s trouble is that he has turned out neither a mystery nor a thriller, something Bentley seems to realize since he modestly decides that perhaps his book is only an “enigma.” The real enigma is that the author of Trent’s Last Case got stopped in his tracks so near the foot of John Buchan’s steps.

* A middle name which has also come to stand for a whole species of short, down-to-earth rhymes originated by Bentley himself. Sample Bentley clerihew:

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, “I am going to dine with some men.

If anybody calls,

Say I am designing St. Paul’s.