Mark Twain’s Pretender: A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage

It’s been awhile since I updated you on the TwainLock project.

Actually, except for a page on the Peschel Press website, I don’t think I’ve said anything about it.

That’s what happens when you’re not doing that well at sharing.

TwainLock: In the Beginning …

It started with a contest. I had just started working for the Patriot-News in late 2000. It was winter, my family was still in South Carolina, and I was well past the age when club-hopping held any attraction. So I caught up on my sleep, went to movies, looked for our future home, and read.

The newspaper had an item about a contest run by the Buffalo Public Library. They had recently acquired the second half of Mark Twain’s manuscript for “Huckleberry Finn,” and was holding a contest to celebrate it being displayed at the library.

One of Twain’s many ideas that went nowhere was to write the first half of a story and give it to a number of notable writers such as Henry James to finish. The results would be published in The Atlantic, which was edited by his friend. Whether through Twain’s inertia, or the candidate writers’ resistance to following in Twain’s wake, nothing came of it.

The library revived the contest. I decided to enter. I had read a goodly amount of Twain over the years, and I thought it would be fun to try to replicate his voice and come up with a solution.

It also gave me something to do in my basement apartment in Lemoyne, and the presence of a deadline improved the chances that I would finish it.

Writing like Twain

I hadn’t worked on a short story so hard. The basic idea was this: In a snowbound village in the middle of nowhere of the Great Plains, the body of an unconscious man was found. He’s taken into town and revived. There’s the possibility of a love triangle that could end in tragedy. Go.

(At least, that’s what I remember of it. The novella was published in 2001 as “A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage.”)

I wrote four thousand words, six drafts and read a lot of Twain to get his voice in my head. I started with several pages of notes, a combination of scenes and me talking out the possible directions the story could go. Each draft more of the scenes were connected, story problems resolved, and dialogue added and revised.

The winter of 2000 in Pennsylvania was cold as heck and the dips in temperature combined with the precipitation to create a lot of snow. There were drifts that hung around until early May before they finally disappeared. I grew up in Ohio, but spend several decades in North and South Carolina, and coming back to grey winter was at turns beautiful and depressing. During one evening snowfall, the highways were closed. I could walk out of my basement cinder-block apartment and step onto Interstate 83, unmarked by any tires or vehicles. It was a beautiful end of the world.

Spring turned into summer. I worked on the story sporadically in between work, visits to South Carolina to move a U-Haul load to my in-laws garage, and visiting the houses we could afford to buy on a copy editor’s salary.

By June, the story was finished. It had to be, like it or not. I sent it off and waited.

Then I heard back. I was a finalist! The library wanted to fly me and two others up to Buffalo for the ceremony!

In September. Of 2001.

And that’s when we’ll pick up the story next week.