 Frontispiece of A Double-Barrelled Detective Story | |
| Author | Mark Twain |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Lucius Hitchcock |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1902 (Harper & Brothers) [1] |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 179 |
| OCLC | 1824124 |
A Double Barreled Detective Story is a short story/novelette by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), in which Sherlock Holmes finds himself in the American west.
The story contains two arcs of revenges. In the primary arc, a rich young woman is abused, humiliated and abandoned by her new husband, Jacob Fuller, whom she married against the wishes of her father. The young Fuller resents her father's rejection and dismissal of him as a ne'er-do-well and resolves to exact his revenge by mistreating his new bride. After his abandonment, she bears a son, whom she names Archy Stillman. When the child gets older, the mother discovers that he possesses an incredible ability of smell, like a bloodhound. The mother instructs her child, now sixteen, to seek out his biological father with the intent of destroying that man's peace and reputation, and hence extracting satisfaction for her.
Five years later in a second arc, at a mining camp in California, Fetlock Jones, a nephew of Sherlock Holmes, kills his master Flint Buckner, a silver-miner, by blowing up his cabin. Since this occurs when Holmes happens to be visiting, Holmes applies his skills to bear upon the case and derives a logically worked conclusion that is proved to be abysmally wrong by Archy Stillman using his sense of smell. This could be seen by the reader as yet another piece where Twain tried to prove that life does not quite follow logic.
This is a satire by Twain on the mystery novel genre. In the second arc, Sherlock Holmes is depicted in employing "scientific methods" to a ridiculous degree, yet arriving at a completely wrong assessment. On the other hand, the crime is solved with a supernatural ability that no normal human possesses. Yet even this fails to reveal the whole truth, as the final twist of the story indicates.
Furthermore, Sam Clemens/Mark Twain poked through the "4th wall" and appeared as himself in the middle of the story, supposedly while the story was being serialized, and responded to letters sent in by readers to the newspaper editor. During the exchange, Twain made fun of/self-advertised some of his other famous short stories.
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard.
A Study in Scarlet is an 1887 detective novel written by Arthur Conan Doyle. The story marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would become the most famous detective duo in literature. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes, a consulting detective, to his friend and chronicler Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story's murder investigation as his "study in scarlet": "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
Irene Norton, née Adler, is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A former opera singer and intelligent opponent to Holmes, she was featured in the short story "A Scandal in Bohemia", published in July 1891. Adler is one of the most notable female characters in the Sherlock Holmes series, despite appearing in only one story. In derivative works, she is frequently used as a romantic interest for Holmes, a departure from Doyle's story, in which Holmes exhibits a platonic admiration for her wit and cunning.
The Sign of the Four (1890), also called The Sign of Four, is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories featuring the fictional detective.
"His Last Bow. The War Service of Sherlock Holmes", later titled "His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes", is one of 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in September 1917 in The Strand Magazine and collected as the last of an anthology of eight stories titled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes the following month. The narration is in the third person, instead of the first person narration usually provided by the character of Dr. Watson, and it is a spy story, rather than a detective mystery. Due to its portrayal of British and German spies on the eve of war, its publication during the First World War and its patriotic themes, the story has been interpreted as a propaganda tool intended to boost morale for British readers.
"The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" (1924) is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and one of the 12 stories collected as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). It was first published in Collier's in the United States in November 1924, and in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in two parts, in February and March 1925.
"The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire", written by British author Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 Sherlock Holmes stories collected between 1921 and 1927 as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. It was first published in the January 1924 issues of The Strand Magazine in London and Hearst's International in New York.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte is an 1896 novel by Mark Twain which recounts the life of Joan of Arc. It is Twain's last completed novel, published when he was 61 years old.
Sherlock Holmes has long been a popular character for pastiche, Holmes-related work by authors and creators other than Arthur Conan Doyle. Their works can be grouped into four broad categories:
Jane Lampton "Jean" Clemens was the daughter of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Langdon Clemens. She drowned in a bathtub at Samuel's home on Christmas Eve 1909, likely due to a seizure.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a 1939 mystery-adventure film released by Twentieth Century Fox and starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Ida Lupino. It is a pastiche featuring the characters of the Sherlock Holmes series of books written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The film credits the 1899 play, Sherlock Holmes by William Gillette as the source material for the movie script, though there is little resemblance in the plots.
The Sherlockian game is the pastime of attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from the 56 short stories and four novels that make up the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle. It treats Holmes and Watson as real people and uses aspects of the canonical stories combined with the history of the era of the tales' settings to construct fanciful biographies of the pair.
Olivia Susan Clemens, was the second child and eldest daughter of Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, and his wife Olivia Langdon Clemens. She inspired some of her father's works, at 13 wrote her own biography of him, which he later published in his autobiography, and acted as a literary critic. Her father was heartbroken when she died of spinal meningitis at age 24.
Clara Langhorne Clemens Samossoud, formerly Clara Langhorne Clemens Gabrilowitsch, was a daughter of Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain. She was a contralto concert singer and she managed his estate and guarded his legacy after his death as his only surviving child. She was married first to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, then to Jacques Samossoud after Gabrilowitsch's death. She wrote biographies of Gabrilowitsch and of her father. In her later life, she became a Christian Scientist.
Mrs. Hudson is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. She is the landlady of 221B Baker Street, the London residence in which Sherlock Holmes lives.
John H. Watson, known as Dr. Watson, is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Along with Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson first appeared in the novel A Study in Scarlet (1887). The last work by Doyle featuring Watson and Holmes is the short story "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" (1927), though this is not the last story in the timeline of the series, which is "His Last Bow" (1917).
This article describes minor characters from the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and from non-canonical derived works. The list excludes the titular character as well as Dr. Watson, Professor Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade, Mycroft Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, Irene Adler, Colonel Moran, the Baker Street Irregulars, and characters not significant enough to mention.
Elementary is an American procedural drama television series that presents a contemporary update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes. It was created by Robert Doherty and stars Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson. The series premiered on CBS on September 27, 2012. It is set and filmed primarily in New York City. With 24 episodes per season, by the end of season two Jonny Lee Miller became the actor who had portrayed Sherlock Holmes the largest number of episodes on television or in film.
A Double Barrelled Detective Story public domain audiobook at LibriVox  | This article about a crime novel of the 1900s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page. |