Death on the Mississippi
by Peter J. Heck
Berkley, 290 pages, $5.99
rating: Neat-O
An amusing little historical mystery, with the gimmick that this time, the detective is Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain. The book is told from the point of view of Clemens' travelling secretary, a naive young Yalie named Wentworth Cabot, Peter Heck not being fool enough to attempt to do an entire novel in Clemens' voice. The mystery deals with the attempt by Twain to recover a missing treasure (the basic story of which was laid out, as a shaggy-dog joke, in an anecdote in Life on the Mississippi. The conceit of Death on the Mississippi is that the story that appeared in Life wasn't fiction, but a fictionalized account of something that happened to Clemens when he was a river-boat pilot, which he passed off as a joke. Years later, he decides to actually look for the treasure, but finds that he isn't the only one in on the hunt. Basically fun, although it suffers a little from Wentworth Cabot being too much of a naïf. Wanting to reach into a book and slap some sense into the narrator isn't usually a good sign. The plot resolution also requires slightly larger doses of coincidence than are comfortable outside of a Twain yarn. Still, I'm a big enough Twain fan, and the book has enough authentic feeling to it that it's worth a read. Or you could start with the second in the series (as I did), A Connecticut Yankee In Criminal Court and get a slightly more mature version of the protagonist, and a more involved and less gimmicky mystery, to boot. Just last weekend I picked up the third, and rest assured that a review will be forthcoming once I've had a chance to read it.