Tracking Twain: The Unfulfilled Pursuit in Mark Twain’s Detective Fiction

Abstract

As early as 1960, Franklin R. Rogers proposed that “in its early stages Huckleberry Finn was to be a burlesque detective story.”1 This hypothesis is supported by the fact that during that period Mark Twain was writing such works as Cap’n Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective and “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage.”2 Rogers’ reasoning is based mainly on Twain’s working notes, which contain repeated references to the death and disappearance of Pap Finn.3 Twain’s notes also hint at the possibility of Jim’s indictment for the murder of Pap; therefore, Rogers concludes, at one time “Twain intended his novel to culminate in a courtroom scene.”4 I have elsewhere supplied a potential missing link between Pap’s murder and the originally proposed courtroom denouement (presenting Pap’s unsolved murder in light of Twain’s interest in the Oedipus myth).5 My theory is based on the distinct image of Pap’s left footprint that Huck finds in the snow one winter morning. Pap’s left boot has a cross nailed into its heel, which creates a unique footprint. Interestingly enough, when Huck and Jim find Pap’s murdered body in the floating house on the river, it is naked. That is, Twain carefully wrote this scene to enable the reader to deduce the absence of Pap’s clothing and boots by having Huck and Jim meticulously list every item that they find at the scene from “an old tin lantern” to “a wooden leg.”6 Pap’s belongings are gone presumably because his murderer has disguised himor herself in Pap’s clothes and boots before fleeing. However, deciding to wear Pap’s boots was deeply unwise, because the murderer would have unknowingly left a trail of Pap’s idiosyncratic footprints. Whoever is investigating the murder (likely Tom Sawyer) would need only to track this distinct trail to catch the culprit.