Shelley Fisher Fishkin listed my first novel, If I Never Get Back, among those she discussed in Lighting Out for the Territory. In that work she pointed out that I have Twain pitching a risky & illegal get-rich scheme (involving grave robbing) that would have been most unlikely in the year 1869, when he was courting Livy and attempting to win her family's favor. Shelley was right, of course, but then almost everything in the story (a time-travel piece) is relatively unlikely--as is certainly true of Twain's own time-travel entertainments. I enjoyed developing Twain not in his familiar ice-cream suit persona but as a less fully formed public figure, young and sometimes lonely and passionately in love with a coal magnate's fair daughter. In Two in the Field (1998), a sequel, Twain again appears, this time in the year 1875, and we visit him in his grand new Hartford mansion, dine with his family, and witness him in his full domestic glory. Now I've done it again: Next month St. Martin's will release a new anthology, Sherlock Holmes: The American Years, in which I have a story with Twain serving as my narrator. I originally projected Twain for a minor cameo role in that first novel. Needless to say, he continues to enlarge his part. Darryl Brock