Paul Trent

Paul Trent was the pen name of Edward Platt (1872–1946), an English novelist who also worked as a solicitor. Sources agree that he wrote dozens of novels, especially mysteries and thrillers, and that his career stretched from the early 20th century to the mid-1940s.

A family-history source says he was born on April 22, 1872, was educated at Matlock and Cheltenham College, and briefly played goal for Gloucester Football Club before following a legal career instead of joining the family engineering business. The same source describes him as remarkably productive, saying that between 1907 and his death in 1946 he wrote 104 books, some of them fast-paced commercial fiction and some with stronger literary ambitions.

Readers today are most likely to meet him through reprints and digital editions of his novels, including titles preserved by Project Gutenberg. Although little seems to be widely known about his personal life, his long run of suspense fiction gave him a lasting place among early 20th-century popular storytellers.