title: A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage
author:  Mark Twain 
description: The Atlantic Monthly, to great hoopla, recently resurrected an 1876 Twain manuscript; in this slim volume, it is reproduced, along with insightful comments from Roy Blount Jr. The question is, do we have a forgotten masterpiece? Or is the Atlantic playing a game like the Duke and the Dauphin's Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn, inflating expectations and leading up merely to a diddly stag show? In Twain's story, a Frenchman is found in a field of snow outside a small Missouri town. He refuses to explain how he got there, but lets it be known he is a Count Fontainebleau. He courts Mary Gray, the town beauty. Mary was intended for her true love, Hugh Gregory, but her father, John Gray, scotched the marriage. David Gray, John's brother, has threatened to drop Mary from his will if she marries Hugh, whom he dislikes. Then David Gray is murdered, and Hugh Gregory is convicted of the crime. Count Fontainebleau is on the verge of marrying Mary when there is a sudden turnaround of events. Twain's original idea was to give a skeleton plot involving a mysterious stranger and a murder to other writers (including, bizarrely, Henry James) and have the Atlantic Monthly publish all their versions a scheme presumably engineered to show Twain's superiority. This never happened. Twain's story is, admittedly, a trifle. Roy Blount directs his comments to the reason Twain put aside Huckleberry Finn to write it, leading him to speculate interestingly, albeit somewhat irrelevantly, on Twain's life and politics, which were shifting in 1876. Altogether, this Twain curiosa is less interesting in itself than for what Blount makes of it. (Sept.)Forecast: Curiosity will spur sales of this bauble, as will the gift-book-size trim and six watercolor illustrations by Peter de Sive.
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  # A Double-Barreled Detective Story
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Mark Twain
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### 1
  
  
  
  
  
    
  The first scene is in the country, in Virginia; the time,
  
  
  1880\. There has been a wedding, between a handsome young man of slender means
  
  
  and a rich young girl--a case of love at first sight and a precipitate
  marriage;
  
  
  a marriage bitterly opposed by the girl's widowed father.
  
  
  
  
  
  Jacob Fuller, the bridegroom, is twenty-six years old,
  
  
  is of an old but unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from
  
  
  Sedgemoor, and for King James's purse's profit, so everybody said--some
  
  
  maliciously the rest merely because they believed it. The bride is nineteen
  
  
  and beautiful. She is intense, high-strung, romantic, immeasurably proud
  
  
  of her Cavalier blood, and passionate in her love for her young husband.
  
  
  For its sake she braved her father's displeasure, endured his reproaches,
  
  
  listened with loyalty unshaken to his warning predictions an