A lift built to be beyond failure becomes the scene of an audacious crime in E. C. Bentley's Trent and the Fool-Proof Lift, a witty Golden Age puzzle for the artist-detective Philip Trent.
Collected in Trent Intervenes (1938), this ingenious short mystery pits human cunning against supposedly perfect engineering. Called to explain how a machine that could not go wrong became the instrument of wrongdoing, the wry, humane Trent looks past the mechanism to the people around it. E. C. Bentley (1875 – 1956), a journalist and the inventor of the comic clerihew verse form, transformed the genre in 1913 with Trent's Last Case, and his later Trent stories carry the same lightness of touch, fair-play plotting, and gentle scepticism about the infallible detective.