Double Barreled Detective Story
Twain takes the most famous detective in English literature and drops him into the California gold rush. Sherlock Holmes, that temple of rational deduction, finds himself in a mining camp where logic means nothing and instinct means everything. When Fetlock Jones, Holmes's own nephew, blows up a silver-miner's cabin, the great detective applies his famous methods to the case and arrives at conclusions that are spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong. An amateur with an absurdly keen nose solves what Holmes cannot. It's a magnificent skewering of the detective genre and a reminder that American reality has no patience for British certainty. This is Twain at his most mischievous: mocking the pretensions of imported European genius and celebrating the messy, illogical nature of actual life.
X-Ray
