What’s it like to write in Mark Twain’s voice

Hello, Bill Peschel here and I have a special offer on one of my books.

tl;dr: “The Casebook of Twain and Holmes” ebook — seven short stories in which Twain tangles with Sherlock (4 cases), Mycroft, Watson, and Irene Adler (1 each) — is on sale for 99 cents in the US and UK stores, this week only. Here’s the link.

Now that that’s out of the way, I decided that these stories would be told in Twain’s voice, because it wasn’t enough of a challenge to figure out how and why Mark Twain would be involved with Sherlock Holmes in the first place.
I have read and loved Twain’s stories for a long time, so how difficult could it be?

First, I learned that Twain didn’t write as if he was a comedian. We tend to encounter him through his memorable quotes, like “Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” and “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” When he’s not thinking of these snappers, he speaks in a different voice, a storytelling voice.

Second, and more importantly, he is an original voice. He doesn’t repeat himself. He doesn’t fall back on trite phrases, or clichés, or what we would call today catchphrases. Reading Mark Twain is like reading the English language as if it were created yesterday. He’s that fresh.

Take a look at “Lionizing Murderers,” an essay about how society lauds murderers, and reflect on how something he wrote in the 1870s can still be relevant 150 years later.

Trying to imitate that distinctive voice to create some humorous tales should be a criminal offense. Certainly Twain would think so, and I blush at the thought of the horrible things you say about me if you ever found out.

As if that wasn’t enough of a daunting task, I chose to have him tell the stories as part of his autobiography project. He undertook this mammoth task near the end of his life and it wasn’t until the last decade that it has been published in its entirety, in three large volumes.

This meant that not only did I want to write in Twain’s voice, it would be a voice that would not remind you of Huckleberry Finn, or the public lecturer, of the coiner of memorable quotes, but of an old man recounting the tales of his past and then deciding that these stories would have to be burned.

Oh, and they had to fit in with the chronology of Sherlock Holmes’s cases, and Mark Twain’s life. Because if you’re going to desecrate two cultural icons, why not go big?

So here they are, at 99 cents, seven stories for which the world will never be prepared for. But if you like them, I’m sure there are more in the wooden box containing loose papers with “BURN THIS” scrawled in charcoal on the side.

Because it’s a magic box, like Watson’s tin box kept in the vaults of Cox and Co. bank.