A Double Barrelled Detective Story
1902
Mark Twain turns his formidable wit on the detective genre, transplanting Sherlock Holmes from foggy London to the raw American West in this mischievous 1902 parody. The story opens with Jacob Fuller, a Virginia man who cruelly tricks his young bride into believing he's died, only to reveal himself years later after she's remarried. Humiliated and vengeful, she disappears. Their son Archy inherits an almost supernatural scent-tracking ability, and when he matures into a detective, he follows his mother's mysterious trail westward, eventually encountering Holmes himself in Colorado. But this isn't a straightforward mystery. Twain demolishes the genre's pomposity by letting Holmes solve the case through absurd luck rather than deduction, while the real emotional weight comes from Archy's quest for truth about his father. It's a short, strange, thoroughly enjoyable thing: part revenge tragedy, part send-up of Victorian detective fiction, and entirely Twain having fun at everyone's expense.
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“How blind and unreasoning and arbitrary are some of the laws of nature - the most of them, in fact!””
— Mark Twain
“What further does it tell us? This: that the assassin was left-handed. How do I know this? I should not be able to explain to you, gentlemen, how I know it, the signs being so subtle that only long experience and deep study can enable one to detect them. But the signs are here, and they are reinforced by a fact which you must have often noticed in the great detective narratives”
— Mark Twain
“No real gentleman will tell the naked truthin the presence of ladies.””
— Mark Twain
“God forgive us, mother, we are hunting the wrong man! I have not slept any all night. I am now awaiting, at dawn,””
— Mark Twain
“Even I feel a drawing toward him”
— Mark Twain
“She said, "The future is secure”
— Mark Twain
“In this world one must be like everybody else if he doesn't want to provoke scorn or envy or jealousy.””
— Mark Twain
“the lawful slave of a scion of slaves,””
— Mark Twain
