We have a 1946 edition printed in New York and Cleveland of Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley. The reason why I singled this out while rummaging through the £1 section of our bookshop is that Howard Hawks made a film early in his career (1929) based on this novel. As I mentioned in my piece on the London Hawks retrospective, the film suffered because it was shot as his first all-talking picture then was forced back into being shot as a silent. A legal screw-up over sound rights killed its commercial promise and bungled its aesthetic composition. Well, at least we've got the book here, and it makes no bones about where that bullet is headed. On the spine of the cover (of which I don't have a photo for the blog at the moment), the bullet is firmly lodged in the centre of this man's head. A bullet mid-fire has never looked so static, and yet irrationally I love the design.
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