A Double Barrelled Detective Story by
Mark Twain My rating:
5 of 5 stars Amazon.in Page
This novella is Mark Twain's satirical jab at the whole Sherlock Holmes concept. In particular, it pokes fun at a detective who eschews everything supernatural in favor of cold rationality, but who produces results so impossible that they are themselves supernatural.
The story has two temporally disjointed parts that almost seem like independent stories until the very end when all is tied up. (Holmes only appears in the second part.) This works nicely for parody of Holmesian detective fiction as it's an approach that was used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on occasion -- e.g. in A Study in Scarlet. The first part tells the tale of a woman who is treated foully by Jacob Fuller, the husband she eloped with but who harbored resentment towards her father, a man Fuller believed felt wasn't good enough for his daughter. The woman makes her son, named Archy Stillman, promise that he will track down Fuller and make the man's life a living hell.
The second part revolves around a murder that seems to be independent of the case described above, the killing of a man named Flint Buckner. Here Sherlock Holmes, who happens to be in town visiting his nephew - Fetlock Jones, "solves" the case only to be shown to be entirely and humiliatingly wrong by Archy Stillman using only a superior sense of smell and basic observation of the facts (with no elaborated inductions.)
While I never had anything against the Sherlock Holmes stories -- in fact, I enjoyed them all -- I did find Twain's satire amusing and compelling as a story. [And it's true that Arthur Conan Doyle did regularly strain credulity -- that's what made Holmes an intriguing character.]
Well worth reading.
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