Mark Twain Wrote a Book Called Tom Sawyer, Detective

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Yes, you read that right.

Mark Twain consistently reinvented his original 1876 novel Tom Sawyer, adding sequels of different genres to it (for different reasons) for the next twenty years.

Tom Sawyer was Twain’s bestselling book, though not initially. According to scholar Peter Messent, Tom Sawyer received lackluster commercial sales during its first year in print, selling only 23,638 copies. Compare these numbers to those from the sales of from Twain’s 1869 humorous travelogue The Innocents Abroad: 69,156 copies sold during its first year. This was partially because, until Tom Sawyer, Twain was known better as a travel writer; but Tom Sawyer‘s imminent popularity was portended by the enormous number of pirated Tom Sawyer stories that began cropping up.

By the time Twain wrote its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, the love for Tom Sawyer was so great that Huckleberry Finn sold approximately 39,000 copies in its first month.

As you might remember from high school, the differences between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin are vast: the former is a clever picaresque, a story (written in the third-person) about two boys in the 1840s who go on various adventures in their Missouri town. Huckleberry Finn is different, a first-person account of a period in the life of Huck Finn that mounts a criticism of racism in America. Huckleberry Finn is set not long after the events of its predecessor, and is similarly set in the Antebellum South; but Twain’s writing about slavery in a post-Civil War context helps build his criticism of the American treatment of Black people throughout the nineteenth century. (It’s worth noting that Twain’s novel, while still appreciated as vanguard and important, has since been unpacked fully by scholars for its simultaneous denunciation of racism and its copious engagement with and participation in racist stereotypes and themes.)

Messent notes that Huckleberry Finn was denounced after it was published and banned in some towns, though not for its perspective of race or criticisms of America, but for its upholding of the themes of “juvenile delinquency” and its featuring coarse and vulgar language. The Concord Public Library in Massachusetts led the charge, refusing to allow the book on its shelves, lest it corrupt the local youth. Indeed, because Tom and Huck are about thirteen-to-fourteen years old, and because Tom Sawyer is an amusing adventure story about boys who find treasure, it was assumed that Huck Finn was also intended for children; Louisa May Alcott, who, before writing Little Women, wrote sensation fiction, criticized the book and said “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.”

Twain, though, wasn’t upset at the uproar brought about by the book banning attempts. On April 15th, 1885, he wrote in his journal, “Those idiots in Concord are not a court of last resort, and I am not disturbed by their moral gymnastics. No other book of mine has sold so many copies within 2 months after issue as this one has done.”

As you might expect, a mass analysis of the complicated anti-racist sentiments of Huckleberry Finn didn’t arise until many years after publication.

Nonetheless, Huckleberry Finn prevailed as an example of transforming a beloved mainstream adventure novel into a different kind of book, still rollicking but something far more literary and challenging and with something far more important to say.

But Twain didn’t stop there.

In 1894, ten years after the publication of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote another sequel. He returned to the popular genre that he had used to bust into the literary world, the humorous travelogue, combining it with a newish genre that had been growing in popularity: the science-fiction story. This book, Tom Sawyer Abroad, is a parody of stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Welles (most notably Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa), and is about how Tom and Huck and Jim take a hot air balloon to Africa, where they fight brigands and robbers and encounter various remaining ancient wonders of the world.

This is a very different kind of book, tonally and formally, than Huckleberry Finn, though perhaps this is signaled by the fact the title references not Huck but Tom and his simple novel of adventures. Huck remains the narrator, though, and takes the readers through a wild, colorfully-described romp (that, as you might expect, does submit to the kind of racist and Orientalist characterizations present in travel novels of that ilk; complicating the American anti-racist elements of Huckleberry Finn). Mostly, though, the novel is about the three young men and their relationships: namely, the new bond between Huck and Jim and the old bond between Tom and Huck, and Tom’s position as the manager of their little cohort.

Two years later, in 1896, Twain did it again. He published Tom Sawyer, Detective, and, like its predecessor, it was both a send-up of a new popular genre, detective fiction, and an immersive and satisfying participant in that genre. As in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Huck is the narrator and Tom is the protagonist. But it’s set on the Phelps Farm from Huckleberry Finn. (Jim isn’t here for this one, in case you’re wondering.)

Twain’s novel seems to have been based on the Danish writer Steen Steensen Bilcher’s 1829 novel The Vicar of Weilby, which was based on a real case, a trial from 1626 of a man named Pastor Søren Jensen Quist, in Vejlby, Denmark. In 1909, a Danish teacher named Valdemar Thoresen accused Twain of plagiarizing Bilcher’s novel. As Bilcher’s novel had been translated from Danish to German, and not English, Twain claimed that it was impossible for him to have plagiarized it, but did acknowledge that he was inspired by the original 1626 case.

Twain made the historical incident his own, however; not only are Tom and Huck detectives in the style of Holmes and Watson, but they also investigate and correctly solve an outrageous mystery involving murder, stolen diamonds, mistaken identity, con men, and (possibly) ghosts. The story culminates in what scholar John C. Gerber has called a “dramatic backwoods trial.”

Twain didn’t publish any further installments in this series of Tom and Huck’s adventures, though he probably intended to. Numerous fragments of stories about Tom and Huck were found in his papers after his death in 1910. In 1891, three years before Tom Sawyer Abroad, Twain teased an idea for a novel in which an elderly Tom and Huck reunite. ” “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom and Becky, etc. Tom comes at last from . . . wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful, is under the mold. They die together.”

Both Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective are available online, and in critical editions.

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