The Woman in Black
When Sigsbee Manderson, the most feared financier on Wall Street, is found dead in the garden of his English country estate, the business world trembles. A bullet in the brain, bruises on his wrist, blood on his clothes, but no clear suspect emerges from the wreckage of his powerful life. Into this vacuum steps Philip Trent: a portrait artist, a gentleman, and an amateur detective whose cheerful charm masks a ferociously sharp mind. Trent doesn't need a badge. He needs only newspapers, observation, and the boundless confidence of a man who believes every puzzle has a solution. What follows is a meticulously plotted descent into the secrets of the dead, a web of motives involving a grieving widow, a resentful partner, and financial dealings darker than the City of London ever admits. But beware: this is no ordinary whodunit. Bentley saves his cruelest trick for the final pages, and no reader emerges unchanged. Part satire of the detective genre, part genuine masterpiece of suspense.
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“Mr. Cupples came out of his reverie. "I think," he said, "I will have milk and soda-water." "Speak lower!" urged Trent. "The head-waiter has a weak heart, and he might hear you.””
— E. C. Bentley
“Many a time when he “took hold” to smash a strike, or to federate the ownership of some great field of labour, [Manderson] sent ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthless than they . . . Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country. Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.””
— E. C. Bentley
“Oh, those people! Can you imagine what it must be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor; can you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you have to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all”
— E. C. Bentley
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Bentley, E. C.. The Woman in Black. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-woman-in-black-303d661c-fa90-4287-942f-652471d7959e.Bentley, E. C. (n.d.). The Woman in Black. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-woman-in-black-303d661c-fa90-4287-942f-652471d7959eBentley, E. C.. The Woman in Black. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-woman-in-black-303d661c-fa90-4287-942f-652471d7959e.
