Samuel Clemens

Tom Sawyer, Detective Samuel Clemens

"Well, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumblety-peg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. . . ."

Huck Finn tells the tale in Tom Sawyer, Detective almost plaing the role of a reporter, as he relates what he's witnessed of a strangely peculiar murder, and tells us of Tom Sawyer's scene-stealing exploits in the trial that follows. . . . Many of the characters we all know from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn return in this tale, with delightful results.