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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 woman was abused, humiliated and abandoned by her fiance Jacob Fuller, while she bore his child. The child was born and named Archy Stillman and when he got older, the mother discovered that the child possessed an incredible ability of smell, like a bloodhound. The mother instructed her child, now sixteen, to seek out his biological father, destroy that man's peace and reputation, hence extract satisfaction for her. Five years later in a second arc, at a mining camp in California, Fetlock Jones, a nephew of Sherlock Holmes, killed his master Flint Buckner, a silver-miner, by blowing up his cabin. Since this occurs when Holmes happened to be visiting, Holmes applied his skills to bear upon the case and derived a logically worked conclusion that was proved to be abysmally wrong by Archy Stillman using his sense of smell. This could be seen 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 was depicted in employing "scientific methods" to a ridiculous degree, yet arriving at a completely wrong assessment. On the other hand, the crime was solved with a supernatural ability that no normal human possesses. Yet even that could fail to reveal the whole truth as the final twist of the story indicated. 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 on some of his other famous short stories."
Acerca del autor
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, prominently known by his penname Mark Twain, was a famous American author and humorist. His most famous works, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," and its sequel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," the latter being called "The Great American Novel." Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for "Huck Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." He worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his brother's newspaper Orion Clemens, prior to which he did apprenticeship with a printer. He later worked as a pilot of a riverboat before he moved west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. His humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," published in 1865 and based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp California, where he had spent time as a miner, brought international fame and attention and was even translated to Classic Greek. He was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. The wit and satire of Twain, both in prose and speech, earned praise from critics and peers. Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, though he lost most of it by investing in ventures, notably the Paige Compositor. The failure of this mechanical typesetter was attributed to its complexity and imprecision. These financial difficulties led him to seek protection from his creditors via bankruptcy and succeeded in overcoming his financial problems with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers. A gentleman by nature, Twain decided to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so. Twain was born shortly after the visit of Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it," too. He died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as "the greatest American humorist of his age," and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."
