1.4 The O. Henry Twist: Friends in San Rosario by O. Henry (1902)

There is a moment in the penultimate episode of the 2016 mini-series The People v OJ Simpson that re-framed how I understand narratives. While the whole show is about the importance of persuasive stories this episode examines what it means for a script to escape the control of the author. In “Manna from Heaven” Marcia Clark and Chris Darden discover something new in the audio tapes which feature officer Mark Fuhrman detailing, with pride, his racist practices in the LAPD. 

While Fuhrman’s vicious quotidian account has already made the tapes controversial, Clark and Darden listen and hear the officer misogynistically insulting Margaret York, one of the highest ranking women in the LAPD. York is also Judge Lance Ito’s wife. This bit of information, combined with a form signed by York that acknowledges that she had no prior relation to Fuhrman, threatens to ruin the case and cause a mistrial.

O. Henry probably concocting another short story conceit (1909-10)

After pouring over the tapes and volleying arguments over their validity, Clark and Darden go to tell Gil Carcetti, the DA, about this new piece of information. As they approach Carcetti, Clark describes this revelation as an “O. Henry twist.” What they thought was the object of contention, Furhman’s racism, is now supplanted by a new problem: will the Judge have to throw the case out because of his relationship to York?

Clark’s phrasing distills an entire narrative format to single figure and his aptitude for challenging expectations and switching the script. O. Henry is the king script flipper. For many the moral heftiness of gift giving was articulated most notably in the final turn in O. Henry’s most famous short story “The Gift of The Magi,” itself adapted into episodes of many television shows.

That twist, which emblematizes the arc of so many stories and short films is on display in the brief tale “Friends in San Rosario” first published in 1902. With character names that recall a Dickens serial, O. Henry’s brief account of a stuffy and taciturn bank examiner named JFC Nettlewick follows nicely from Stevenson’s professional-ideological musing in the last post. The last act of Stevenson’s story relied on a conversation in which the poet-thief Francois Villon needed only to hide his beliefs about the way conditions structure individual actions. He didn’t and that resulted in him returning to the snowy landscape to roam.

For O. Henry, the relationship between beguiling acts which seem to serve some sort of greater good becomes the impetus for his classic twist. Where Stevenson lets the question of honor among thieves sit unsettled, O. Henry attaches himself as a proponent of such a view.

“Friends in San Rosario” begins with Nettlewick arriving in the titular town to examine the records at the local First National Bank. Driven by the hope that he can visit, take care of business (in the most fastidious manner) and leave that same day, Nettlewick takes on the role of a government official who is there only to follow through on his job. He is a man who is “mysteriously momentous.” While he works, his life is his job and any niceties are best suited to be discarded.

Discussing the O. Henry Twist in The People v OJ Simpson

When he enters the bank before it opens employees are immediately surprised: Nettlewick’s demeanor is antithetical to the previous examiner’s. Financial anxiety is paired with personal suspicion. Bank laborers pass each other notes and surreptitiously inhabit the space which seems to have everything in order. That is until some tens of thousands of dollars in securities are missing. 

As Nettlewick sits down to speak with the president of First National Bank, Major Thomas Kingman, he is regaled with stories of the old West and of Major Tom’s old comrade and solider buddy, Bob Buckley. Nettlewick listens, less out of respect, than out of a modicum of admiration: he is impressed by Major Tom’s grace in a scenario in which he has literally watched men kill themselves. Excited by the thrill of catching a banker in the midst of an impropriety—Major Tom had admitted to taking the securities out and holding them personally—Nettlewick waits, eager to file this illegal display away.

Major Tom’s storytelling becomes the substance of much of “Friends in San Rosario.” His anecdote provides a glimpse into the fictional imaginative Western world which “The Two-Gun Man” illustrated. But O. Henry’s talent is in the just off-kilter sense that is created among the ways in which the bank employees interact with Nettlewick. Nettlewick doesn’t just count the coins with preciousness he crudely  “dumps the gold upon the counter” in an act of power. As his fingers move through each piece of money, the air is “full of fractional currency.” These peculiar descriptions of small actions define Major Tom’s story, which has its own twist that relies on the unexpected importance of sleep walking.

Poster for the 1912 film adaptation

When all is said and done, Major Tom is left both accountable and in the clear as he has produced the money from his pocket. His actions are not illegal though to Nettlewick they seem confusing. Like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, the pieces of the puzzle are all laid out in small details. The turn of O. Henry’s tale doesn’t bring with it the kind of “aw shucks” Hallmark movie sentiment that “The Gift of the Magi” is famous for. Instead “Friends in San Rosario” highlights the painful bond that sometimes exists between military men who are so intimate they might consider themselves brothers. The ties of friendship, even when strong, are not always benevolent.

Surely this story takes aim at the governmental bureaucracies and regulations that appear stifling to a local institution. Here is a case in which the G-man is out to get the banks. He doesn't care who the employees are or what they might be after. And in this there is a thread of conservatism that remains deeply entrenched in the good old boys attitude of filial piety. This is where Marcia Clark’s description aids us in a reconsideration of the politics, affect, and language involved in the “O. Henry Twist.” 

As much as Nettlewick becomes a figure to blame, a middle management regulator who can’t seem to understand how “the people” are just trying to get by, there is something melancholic in the story’s conclusion. There is insight into a sentiment adjacent to survivor’s guilt. Where the ultimate gift in “The Gift of the Magi” got its moral weight from the beautiful ways that individuals made themselves subservient to one another, here the willingness to supplicate oneself morphs into a sentence for life. That sentence must be repaid. Forever.

What becomes clear in Major Tom’s story is that he will feel forever indebted to Bob Buckley. The past had decreed that. Major Tom has no choice be to act and fulfill that obligation.

And that is where the O. Henry Twist might finally reside. Not in what one may do to help one another, but how one can so quickly be thrust into perpetual personal debt.

You can read “Friends in San Rosario,” included in the collection Roads of Destiny, at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1646

You can listen to “Friends in San Rosario” as part of a short story collection at Librivox: https://librivox.org/short-story-collection-vol-049-by-various/