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Part of Twain's "A Skeleton Novelette" ms.
Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley |
Among the items of the "
Mark Twain at Play" exhibition of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library is "
A Skeleton Novelette," a tantalizing 1893 outline in which (according to the
Complete Letters of Mark Twain)
Twain and editor William Dean Howells proposed that 12 authors write a mystery with the same plot and characters but without knowledge of the other participants' approaches. "
There ought to be a murder," Twain wrote. "It ought to be a mysterious murder and the criminal be found out through
circumstantial evidence." I am uncertain who wrote the faint inscription "Same old idea" on the paper, but Twain biographer and letter commentator
Albert Bigelow Paine seemed equally unimpressed with the idea, writing, "perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out."
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