Caroline Lawrence 

My inspiration: Caroline Lawrence on Mark Twain

When The Roman Mysteries author Caroline Lawrence decided to write about the Wild West, she fell in head over hills in love with the writing and wit of Mark Twain
  
  

Caroline Lawrence and Mark Twain
Caroline Lawrence with her hero Mark Twain, at the Mark Twain Bookstore in Virginia City, Nevada in the US. Photograph: Caroline Lawrence Photograph: Caroline Lawrence

Like every child growing up in America, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

It was the British historical author Mary Renault who got me hooked on history with the 'Book That Changed My Life'. (No, that's not its title; it's actually called The Last of the Wine.) That book inspired me to study Greek, then Latin.

That book sent me from California to Cambridge university to study classics. That book kept enthusing me as I taught Latin to London school kids. That book is the reason I started writing my own historical fiction series: The Roman Mysteries. But after I had written seventeen full-length mysteries, two volumes of mini-mysteries, a travel guide and some quiz books, not to mention a spin-off Roman Mystery Scrolls series, I thought it was time I moved to new historical pastures. And for that, I needed a new muse to inspire me.

I wanted to set some books in the Wild West because I love deserts, shootouts and lonely cowboys (or Indians) riding their faithful steeds into the sunset. I thought it might be fun to set my books in Nevada, which is in the West and still pretty Wild. You can still gamble, carry a loaded pistol and go into a silver-mine and they still have saloons with swinging doors, boardwalks, and horses.

So, in November 2008 I went on a road trip to Nevada with my sister, Jennifer, to scout out possible locations for this new Western series. ("Western" is a type of genre: a book or movie usually set in the western United States in the second half of the 1900s.)

Now, if I had an Indian name, it would be "Stands in Confusion". Luckily, my sister's Indian name would be "Hawkeye". She is an excellent driver and would have been the scout on an olden-days wagon train. As we drove into Virginia City one sunny November day my sister suddenly said, "Get a load of that guy!"

I looked out the passenger seat window and saw a bearded man dressed in braces, long underwear and a floppy felt hat. Now people in America, even Nevada, do not usually dress like that. Especially not on a weekday. Especially with no movie crew in sight.

"Stop the car!" I yelled. Jennifer sighed and stopped the car.

I jumped out and ran over to him. "You look amazing!" I gushed. "Who are you?"

"My name," drawled the man, "is Stinky with an E: StinkE."

At that moment I knew I had found the setting for my Wild West series. When I then discovered that Mark Twain had arrived in Virginia City in 1862, not a white-haired old man but rather a gun-toting, hard-drinking, pipe-smoking young man of 27, I thought, "Dang my buttons! I do believe I have found my muse as well as my setting!"

Young Sam Clemens (he still hadn't chosen the pen-name Mark Twain) was all the things I've listed above. He was also a racist, for he had not yet met his beloved Livy and her forward-thinking family and learned that Racism is Wrong. Mark Twain was also lazy, deceitful, greedy, ungracious, unforgiving, grumpy, prudish, spiteful and vain.

How do we know?

He tells us.

And this is his Get Out of Jail Free card: his self-awareness. He knew better than anyone else that he had grievous faults and he was the first to admit to them.

The other thing about him – maybe the best thing of all – is that in a land of very witty men, he was the wittiest. His dry-as-dust sagebrush humour didn't spring from his mind like Athena from Zeus's head. He learnt it from the clever journalists of the time including: Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, AJ Marsh, Alf Doten, Joe Goodman, Rollin Daggett and Dan de Quille. They all wrote witty articles, made clever jokes and used vocabulary like Twain.

In a way it's not fair. Any witticism or clever anonymous article from the 1860s is usually attributed to Twain like iron filings to a magnet, and I'll bet you have never heard of any of those other clever reporters and writers before.

My favourite Twain book? None of them. My favourite things written by Twain are his letters and his newspaper articles. You can read his letters for free online. More are being added every day as people discover them in attics or between the pages of old books. Twain's letters are utterly enchanting; funny, descriptive, honest, poignant, tragic, uplifting and completely of their time. You can read one here. Only a few of his newspaper articles have survived because Virginia City kept catching fire, but you can read the remaining ones here.

Let me leave you with a sample passage from the Territorial Enterprise Newspaper of January 6, 1863:

FREE FIGHT.— A beautiful and ably conducted free fight came off in C street yesterday afternoon, but as nobody was killed or mortally wounded in a manner sufficiently fatal to cause death, no particular interest attaches to the matter, and we shall not publish the details. We pine for murder — these fist fights are of no consequence to anybody.

That is why Mark Twain is my muse and my inspiration.

• Caroline Lawrence's The Case of the Pistol-Packing Widows and The Case of the Bogus Detective are the third and fourth (and final) books in the whip cracking and death defying adventure series, The PK Pinkerton mysteries.

 

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