ABSTRACT
Mark Twain stands as an unsung father figure to the development of detective fiction and the concerns that would come to inhabit it. He directs most of his comic energies in the second part of his story to Doyle's hero and the "exact science" of Holmes's detective methods, its "analytic reasoning from effects to causes". Twain clearly also shows in Pudd'nhead Wilson how detection and the legal system of the time endorse and support a society based on moral corruption and racial injustice. Wilson, Twain's detective, uses his rational skills to repair the rupture crime has caused in this southern small-town society, restores the social and racial status quo, and puts things "right". In Pudd'nhead Wilson, in "The Stolen White Elephant", and elsewhere, then, Twain queries the detective's status, his relationship to the larger social reality, and to the operating principles of a world he would rationally.
