Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer, Detective (Annotated) Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer, Detective is a classic Mark Twain detective novel is a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Tom Sawyer Abroad. Tom Sawyer attempts to solve a mysterious murder in this lampooning of the immensely popular detective novels of the time. In 1909, Danish schoolmaster Valdemar Thoresen claimed, in an article in the magazine Maaneds, that the plot of the book had been plagiarized from Steen Blicher's story The Vicar of Weilby. Blicher's work had been translated into German, but not into English, and Twain's secretary wrote Mr. Thoresen a letter, stating, "Mr. Clemens is not familiar with Danish and does not read German fluently, and has not read the book you mention, nor any translation or adaptation of it that he is aware of. The matter constituting 'Tom Sawyer, Detective, ' is original with Mr. Clemens, who has never been consciously a plagiarist. WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and going in a-swimming.