Alternative reading

The Trailor Murder Mystery (1846)
by Abraham Lincoln

In 1841 the young Abraham Lincoln was working as an attorney in Illinois. He became the defence counsel for three brothers named Trailor, who were accused of murdering an odd-job man for his money. No corpse had been found: the odd-job man had simply disappeared, and the brothers seemed suddenly wealthy, which was enough for the good folk of Springfield, IL. Then the odd-job man turned up alive and the case collapsed. Lincoln, unpaid for his services, tried to recoup something by writing an account of the affair for the newspaper The Quincy Whig, which splashed it as ‘A Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder’ on 15 April 1846. It was later reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine of March 1952 under the title ‘The Trailor Murder Mystery’. Lincoln was a great admirer of Poe and the proto-detective fiction of the 1840s, but his tale is flat and ends sheepishly when nothing happens and everyone goes home.