Mark Twain was born in 1835 and died in 1910, making 2010 both the 175th anniversary of his birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. There have been special events throughout the year, including an exhibit currently at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, titled "Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress," which has handwritten manuscripts and typescripts of works by Twain, his letters and correspondence, drawings and illustration mock-ups for printed editions, photographs, and several three-dimensional artifacts.
Twain turned his considerable satirical talents on all manner of subject material during his career, including detective fiction, which had gotten a boost from the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, (whose first appearance in publication was in 1887). In 1996, Oxford University Press bundled several of Twain's crime fiction parodies into one volume, The Stolen White Elephant and Other Detective Stories, with a foreward by Walter Mosley. The collection includes several short stories and two novellas, "Tom Sawyer, Detective," in which Twain's most popular creation tries to solve a mysterious murder and "A Double Barrelled Detective Story" that transports Sherlock Holmes to the American wild west and sees his famous logic bested by a young amateur detective who relies on supernatural sense of smell.
As you might expect, Twain wasn't a huge fan of the detective fiction of the day, once saying, "What a curious thing a 'detective' story is. And was there ever one that the author needn't be ashamed of, except the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue'?" One wonders what he would have made of the likes of Donald E. Westlake, Carl Hiaasen and Donna Andrews. . .
