A bloody act, a betrayal and a bond for life

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A murder, a fraud and a knot (A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage) is a story by Mark Twain (1835-1910), which was published 1876th

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The story takes place in the sleepy prairie village of Deer Lick, which, like Tom Sawyer's St. Petersburg, is reminiscent of Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri . The poor farmer John Gray wants to marry off his daughter Mary to Hugh Gregory, the scion of a wealthy family. But then he learns that Mary can count on an even larger inheritance from her uncle Dave, John's unloved brother, with whom he has had a dispute for years - but only if Mary Hugh does not marry, because David Gray hates Hugh Gregory. John Gray then forbids Hugh and Mary to marry.

Suddenly a stranger appears who is found unconscious in the snow. He calls himself George Wayne; but soon it was rumored that he was in fact a French count named Fontainebleau. He falls in love with Mary, but Hugh mourns afterwards. After an argument with Hugh Gregory, Dave Gray is found murdered and Hugh is sentenced to death on seemingly overwhelming evidence. Mary, who has inherited richly from her murdered uncle and is prevented by her father from any communication with the imprisoned Hugh, agrees to marry the count. On the day of the wedding, however, it turns out that the alleged count committed the murder: Hugh is saved from the scaffold just in time and the ceremony is interrupted.

background

The last chapter of the story is designed as a first-person narration of the murderer and fake Count Fontainebleau. In it, the first-person narrator portrays himself as the victim of a "certain Monsieur Jules Verne, a writer", who had his travel experiences told, exaggeratedly embellished them and published them in books: "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" and "Reise around the world in eighty-five days ”. The first-person narrator threw Jules Verne out of a hot air balloon out of anger, and for fear of ending up on the gallows for this deed, he fled France and ended up in Deer Lick.

This last chapter provides an ironic glimpse into Mark Twain's self-image as a writer: Here he expresses his envy of the more famous and successful contemporary Jules Verne , who was able to live very well from the earnings of his books (which Mark Twain also dreamed of for a lifetime). He portrays him as an unscrupulous writer who writes about experiences that he has not had himself and who also grossly exaggerates them.

Edition history

Mark Twain wrote the story in 1876 as a so-called blindfold novelette . That was the name of a popular type of narrative that was used to encourage other writers to follow a given plot scheme. In this case, Henry James and William Dean Howells had been thought of, but the project never materialized and the story was forgotten. In 1995, the unpublished story was discovered by a librarian at the Public Library of the University of Buffalo, New York, which administers the Mark Twain estate. In 2001 it appeared for the first time in the USA in The Atlantic Monthly magazine and simultaneously in the German translation.

Individual evidence

  1. Georg Klein : Epilogue to a bloody deed, a deception and a bond for life . Manesse Verlag, Zurich 2001, pp. 70–73.
  2. ^ Editorial note of the Manesse edition, p. 85.