I do wish to Heaven you had given us more of these books," wrote Dorothy L. Sayers to fellow crime writer E.C. Bentley in April 1936. The occasion was the appearance of the long-awaited sequel to Trent's Last Case, Bentley's enormously influential detective novel published in 1913. Sayers' gushing enthusiasm — "yours are BOOKS, full of humanity and the Humanities, touching life on all sides' — is tempered with a certain regret, a plaintive note of reproach at Bentley's prolonged silence. "With you to help us", Sayers chides, "we should not have taken half so long to get the detective novel recognized as literature."¹ Bentley had written too little, too late.