Tom Sawyer, Detective

Tom Sawyer, Detective is a novel by the American writer Mark Twain, published in 1896. It follows The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer Abroad.

The book is a burlesque of the detective fiction that was enormously popular at the time, and it is narrated by Huck Finn in his own voice, which means the reader gets the case through a witness rather than through the detective. Tom and Huck travel down the Mississippi and become involved in the affairs of a family in Arkansas when a man they meet on the road asks them to deliver a message to his uncle. A theft and a killing follow, a confession is produced that explains nothing, and Tom takes charge of the investigation with the techniques he has picked up from reading, which Twain uses to send up the conventions of the genre. Twain had returned to these characters repeatedly over twenty years, and the story was written for serial publication before it appeared as a book.

The courtroom and the river towns of the period give the book its setting, and the mystery is solved by observation and by the inconsistencies in the story the guilty parties tell.