Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)

I can be as impatient as anyone with the way Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as capable of the most uncanny feats of deduction. Look close in those stories and you see it’s usually a bunch of lucky guesses, though yes based on close observation. We don’t even get that much in Mark Twain’s sendup, just the wild guesses served in a lukewarm stew of familiar tropes: twins separated at birth, riverboat culture up and down the Mississippi River, and Huck Finn narrating admiring stories of that rascal, dreamy-headed Tom Sawyer. This was one I meant to get to as a kid (the cover above was on the on the copy I had). Somehow along the line I got the impression Tom was grown up in it, an adult. Turns out that’s not the case. It’s Huck and Tom at home in St. Petersburg (based of course on Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri), and unfortunately it is the worst of all the Huck and Tom novels and/or stories I’ve seen so far. Tom Sawyer Abroad at least has some charming moments. Tom Sawyer, Detective just felt tired and uninspired. At this point, I resent a little the way I imagine Twain must have rationalized things like outrageous coincidence as just part of the parody. It’s more like just part of the laziness. One good thing here is that Jim is spared the indignities he suffers in most of the other Huck and Tom tales. Detective feels like a hurry-up job in many ways. The last chapter is four times longer than any other and intent on tying up all loose ends, unconvincingly—because that’s part of the parody! It just seems empty of any goodwill. It’s also quite short—maybe 70 or 80 pages?—and I’m a little mystified to see it referred to as a novel. But then I’m the one usually complaining about designations like “novella” and “novelette.” Maybe Twain was jealous of Arthur Conan Doyle’s success with Sherlock Holmes (note to self: read a Twain biography). Because it fails so abjectly at it, Tom Sawyer, Detective is a practical demonstration in how difficult it actually is to construct a mystery story that passes the smell test. Never mind that it doesn’t seem to understand the appeal of them at all, let alone Sherlock Holmes. Disappointing in every way.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.