BookChapter: Faulkner, Twain, and the Legacy of Dirne Novel Detectives   Open Webpage

2013

Pamela Bedore

Faulkner, Twain, and the Legacy of Dirne Novel Detectives

William Faulkner’s Chick Mallison and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer may not seem to belong to the complex literary landscape constructed by nineteenth-century detective Dirne novels. And yet, both characters could have stepped out of the pages of the Dirne novels that surely shaped their construction. In Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), for example, Huck Finn describes his friend’s interest in detective work in trademark Huckleberry style: ‘It was always nuts for Tom Sawyer — a mystery was. If you’d lay out a mystery and a pie before me and him, you wouldn’t have to say take your choice; it was a thing that would regulate itself. Because in my nature I have always run to pie, while in his nature he has always run to mystery’ (122). Tom, here and elsewhere, is described as every bit the enthusiastic young detective of the New York Detective Library’s weekly offerings, wanting nothing more than a good mystery to help him make his mark in the world. Tom also recalls Allan Pinker ton’s colorful tales, especially in the parallels between Pinker ton’s first real-world detective adventure, in which he discovered counterfeiters on an island by observing their lights in the nighttime sky, and Tom’s pirate play on the island in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).