Mark Twain

A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage

An unpublished Mark Twain story surfaces 125 years after it was first written.

Set in the quaint hollow of Deer Lick, a mythical town resembling Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri, this bizarre tale chronicles the fortunes of a humble farmer, John Gray, determined to marry off his daughter, Mary, to the scion of the town's wealthiest family. But the sudden appearance of a stranger found lying unconscious in the snow not only derails Gray's plans but also leads to a mysterious murder whose solution lies at the heart of this captivating story.

Written in 1876 between the completion of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the commencement of work on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage anticipates many of the themes found in Twain's later works. Twain, already one of the country's most celebrated authors, composed this story in the year of America's centennial as a work of entertainment, a so-called "blind novelette." He then dared other great writers of the day, including Henry James and William Dean Howells, to compose other endings to the story, but the competition never took place (as Roy Blount Jr. comments with the aid of some historical hindsight, "Can any sane person, we may ask, have expected to get Henry James's juices flowing with a plot abounding in bumpkins, spleen, assault and battery?") and the story was thought by many to have been lost.

In addition to a Foreword and Afterword by the Southern novelist and humorist Roy Blount Jr. that places the story perfectly in its proper historical and literary context, the book is also graced by six newly commissioned illustrations by Peter de Sève, whose atmospheric renderings compellingly re-create the rural world of nineteenth-century Missouri in all its quirky detail. Even the crusty Twain, who was renowned for his tussles with illustrators, no doubt would have smiled at these faithful interpretations.

Published here in book form for the first time, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage allows us, once again, to celebrate the literary genius of Mark Twain, nearly one hundred years after his death. Its appearance should be a cause for celebration.