The Legend of Mark Twain Lives in Peter J. Heck’s acclaimed mystery series . . .
Praise for
A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court
“An enjoyable tour of 1890’s New Orleans . . . Twain can take a bow for his performance. Heck takes a colorful city (New Orleans) and a colorful character (Mark Twain), adds a murder, a duel, some voodoo and period detail and conjures up an entertaining sequel to Death on the Mississippi.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A period charmer . . . Against the background of this famous city with its colorful mix of characters, cultures, food, music, and religion, the famous author and his loyal sidekick worm their way into the heart of a scandalous murder.”
—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
“Packed with casual racists, unregenerate Civil War veterans, superstitious rationalists, and poseurs of every stripe—exactly the sort of colorful cast that brings its satiric hero’s famous talent for unmasking pretension into brilliant relief.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This Crescent City mystery simmers.”
—Booklist
“The second of Heck’s Mark Twain detective novels is a charming winner. Twain is as fabulous a personality in fiction as he was a real-life writer . . . A unique, intriguing reading experience.”
—Ed’s Internet Book Review
“Exciting.”
—Book Alert
DEATH ON THE MISSISSIPPI
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN CRIMINAL COURT
THE PRINCE AND THE PROSECUTOR
The Prince
and the
Prosecutor
A Mark Twain Mystery
Peter J. Heck
The Prince and the Prosecutor
Copyright © 1997 by Peter J. Heck.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
For Dan, and the boys in the band.
Historical Note and Acknowledgments
As with my previous Mark Twain mysteries, this novel walks a line between history and fiction, using historical figures as fictional characters, and introducing them into situations that they never faced in real life. While Mark Twain met Rudyard Kipling on more than one occasion, they never crossed the Atlantic together on the same ship. Nor did they ever collaborate to catch a murderer—Carrie Kipling would certainly have mentioned such an event in her highly detailed diaries, had it occurred.
I have done my best to portray Mark Twain and his era as faithfully as possible, and to make him and the Kiplings (the only other historical figures here) act and speak as they probably would have in the circumstances they face here. The historical Twain’s financial difficulties in the early 1890s, stemming from a series of bad investments and worse luck, sent him to the brink of bankruptcy. He sent his wife and daughters to Europe, to take advantage of a cheaper cost of living, while he made several trips across the Atlantic, going on lecture tours and tending to his finances in the U.S. By the end of the nineties he had paid his debts. I show him at the beginning of this period, although I have rearranged his itinerary for my own purposes.
I have taken certain other liberties with fact. These include my resuscitation of Mittel Reuss, a German principality that ceased to exist in 1616, as well as my wholesale remodeling of the City of Baltimore, the historical version of which was a much older and smaller ship than the one portrayed here. I hope the reader will take these inventions in the same spirit as my creation of the various imaginary characters who play supporting roles to Mr. Clemens and the Kiplings.
My fictional Mark Twain tells a number of jokes and stories that the historical Twain wrote or told on many occasions. As a practiced public speaker, he had on hand a stock repertory of witticisms and anecdotes, which he expanded and modified for different audiences, so it is no surprise that he would do so during the voyage portrayed in these pages. I stand ready to accept the reader’s verdict that my own inventions (there are a few here!) fall short of Mr. Clemens’s enviable standards, but I hope they are at least in the proper spirit.
As always, too many people to mention individually have had some hand in helping me bring this novel to completion. I owe special thanks to my editors, Laura Anne Gilman and Natalee Rosenstein; to my agent, Martha Millard; and to my wife, Jane Jewell, my first and most demanding reader. Thanks also to Charles Chaffee, for information on early ocean liners. The book would have been far less than it is without their contributions; of course, any flaws that remain are my own responsibility.
The Prince
and the
Prosecutor
“William, someone is calling you on the telephone.” I looked up in surprise at my mother, who had interrupted my leisurely breakfast with this remarkable announcement. Until then, I had been dawdling over my coffee and reading a newspaper.
“Really,” I said. “I wonder who it could be.” The telephone had been installed in my parents’ home in New London only a few months before, shortly after my graduation from Yale in 189—. Having left home very soon thereafter, I had never before gotten a telephone call at home.
With a feeling somewhere between excitement and anxiety, I arose from the dining room table and walked out to the front hallway, where the instrument had been mounted on the wall near the foot of the stairs. I picked up the earpiece, and spoke into the conical black tube. “Hello, are you there? This is Cabot; who’s calling, please?”
“Wentworth, is that you?” came a familiar drawling voice, recognizable even over the telephone as that of my employer, Mr. Samuel Clemens, a writer and lecturer of some repute. “I’ve hung around this blasted telephone office half the morning trying to get hold of you—you’d think they’d give faster service, for what they charge for long distance. Good thing there’s only one Cabot with a phone in New London, or the operators would never have found you. I was about ready to give up and send a telegram, except I hate cramming my whole damn message into ten words, and I’d still have had to wait for the answer. How’d you like to go to Europe?”
“Europe!” I exclaimed. “When do we leave?”
In the capacity of traveling secretary, I had recently accompanied Mr. Clemens (who was better known to the public under the pen name Mark Twain) on an extensive lecture tour of the Mississippi Valley, New Orleans, and the South. The tour itself had been a great success, with overflow crowds in every town where we stopped. Upon our return to New York, Mr. Clemens had proclaimed himself satisfied with my performance of my duties, paying me a bonus of a hundred dollars above my salary for the tour.
But it had been over a month since our return. I had sat idle for all of September and into October. True, I had spent a few hours each day working on my notes of the tour, with the notion of turning them into something