Painter and journalist Phillip Trent, who has collaborated with Scotland Yard detectives on other cases, is summoned by an old friend to investigate the shooting of an American financier whose body has been discovered on the grounds of his English home. The coroner's inquest concludes with a verdict of "persons unknown".
Trent follows the chain of evidence and draws up a manuscript naming the financier's English secretary as the murderer, but leaves the manuscript with the financier's widow, with whom he has fallen in love, but whom he suspects of complicity in the murder.
Trent's conclusions turn out to be wrong.
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote the introduction to the copy I have; she emphasizes the break it made with the detective novel as it existed prior to publication of this book in 1913.
"If you were so lucky as to read it today for the first time, you would recognize it at once as a tale of unusual brilliance and charm, but you could have no idea how startlingly original it seemed when it first appeared. It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again."
So much for the "'infallible sleuth', with his cut-and-dried clues--and cast-iron deductions, who plodded mechanically along the trail, always wearisome and always right."
Trent’s conclusions, although carefully reasoned and based on the available evidence, are not not right, and that fact, when revealed to him, leads him to resolve to have nothing further to do with detecting mysteries.
Grade: A.
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