Publisher's Synopsis
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 fiancé 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., Lucius Hitchcock was an American visual artist who was born in 1868. Several works by the artist have been sold at auction, including 'A decisive moment' sold at Christie's New York 'Christie's Interiors' in 2012. The artist died in 1942.... Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel". Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After an apprenticeship with a printer, Twain worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading 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.In 1865, his humorous story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek.His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so....
