"A warlord in the army of God"

I've posted before about a favorite collection of mystery short stories, Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries, by West Virginia author Melville Davisson Post, who resided in Lost Creek, WV, and inevitably would have known and been known by Seventh Day Baptists there. A later collection of uncollected Uncle Abner stories was published by The Aspen Press in 1974. The Methods of Uncle Abner appears to be out of print but second-hand copies can be found at reasonable prices.

From the back flyleaf about the author:

MELVILLE DAVISSON POST (1871-1930) was born in Harrison county, West Virginia, the approximate locale of the Uncle Abner stories. Although he traveled widely in his later years, he spent most of his life in this area, graduating from West Virginia University ("a college of unbeautiful nonsense," as he called it) in 1891 and receiving his law degree from the same school in 1892. For a number of years he practiced law in West Virginia and was active in Democratic state politics, eventually giving up a promising career in this field to become a full-time writer. His earliest stories, dealing with the unscrupulous lawyer, Randolph Mason, were as controversial as they were popular, demonstrating as they did how justice might be legally subverted. ....

He made his home in Lost Creek, West Virginia, where he relaxed by riding horse-back and reading the classics. He died in 1930 following a fall from a horse.

And from the front flyleaf:

UNCLE ABNER, a formidably righteous country squire of the hill region of pre-Civil War (West) Virginia, is the most memorable of a series of detectives created by Melville Davisson Post, one of the most accomplished Americans writing in the genre.... The Abner stories began appearing in magazines in 1911, and the first eighteen were collected in 1918 under the title Uncle Abner. Master of Mysteries, a volume that Ellery Queen has ranked as one of the four finest collections of detective short stories ever published.

It was Queen who announced the discovery that a second series of Abner tales had been published in The Country Gentleman in 1927 and 1928. "Utterly incredible as it may seem," he wrote, "none of the tales in this second series has ever appeared in book form—a prodigious publishing pity." .... They are for the most part equal in conception and execution to the first eighteen stories, with Abner unchanged, still a warlord in the army of God, riding forth on his chestnut horse to do battle with the forces of evil. ....

Abner was an original, and in him Post may well have given us our first truly great American detective. Dupin, after all, was a Frenchman, and until Hammett came along most American detectives were modeled, for better or for worse, after their British counterparts. But for all his Old Testament flavor, Abner is a wholly American figure, whose roots lie not in Doyle but in Melville. He is a sane Ahab, seeking not vengeance but justice, and a character no reader is likely to forget. As Edmund Crispin describes him, he is "the good man and the reasoning man splendidly combined into one."

Uncle Abner is available, free, as an e-book for Kindle, Nook, and other electronic formats: Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post - Free eBook. Others of his are also there, but not The Methods of....

Master of mysteries

Joseph Bottum writes about the role of religion in mysteries and wonders why the Uncle Abner stories are so unfamiliar:

G.K. Chesterton’s Fr. Brown stories are proof that only the British style of detective fiction can reach to religion—or so, at least, a friend recently claimed. ....

My friend’s exposition was quite learned, in its way, although nutty as an almond tree. And I found myself halfway through a full-throated defense of the Uncle Abner stories before I figured out that my widely read friend had never read them or even heard of their author, Melville Davisson Post. ....

Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, collecting most of the stories,was published in 1918.

In an earlier essay on the stories Bottum began:

There is a case to be made that the Uncle Abner stories—the twenty-two tales of the Virginia hills written by Melville Davisson Post between 1911 and 1928—are among the finest mysteries ever written. ....

Later he uses a quotation to describe the character:

“I ought to say a word about my Uncle Abner,” the narrator tries to explain in 1911’s “The Angel of the Lord,” the first of these tales set just before the Civil War in the cattle country and hills of what would later become West Virginia. “He was one of those austere, deeply religious men who were the product of the Reformation. He always carried a Bible in his pocket and he read it where he pleased. Once the crowd at Roy’s Tavern tried to make sport of him when he got his book out by the fire; but they never tried it again. . . . Abner belonged to the church militant, and his God was a war lord.”

And, from another story:

He was one of those austere, deeply religious men who might have followed Cromwell, with a big iron frame, a grizzled beard and features forged out by a smith. His god was the god of the Tishbite, who numbered his followers by the companies who drew the sword. The land had need of men like Abner. The government of Virginia was over the Alleghenies, and this great, fertile cattle country, hemmed in by the far-off mountains like a wall of the world, had its own peace to keep. And it was these iron men who kept it. The fathers had got this land in grants from the King of England; they had held it against the savage and finally against the King himself. . . . And the sons were like them.

An important aspect of the stories:

Post always loved a biblical turn. In a typical passage in “Naboth’s Vineyard,” the county doctor asks, “But where is the motive?”—and Abner replies, “In the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Kings.” So, too, in “The Doomdorf Mystery,” when Abner and Randolph arrive at their destination, they find a Protestant preacher, a “circuit rider of the hills,” sitting on his horse before the door. “‘Bronson,’ said Abner, ‘where is Doomdorf?’ The old man lifted his head and looked down at Abner over the pommel of the saddle. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘he covereth his feet in his summer chamber.’”

Even for the biblically literate readership of Post’s time, this is a rather cryptic way of announcing that Doomdorf is dead. But the story from which Bronson quotes—Ehud’s assassination of the Moabite king Eglon in Judges 3:24—contains, in fact, the elements that Post puts in his own tale: a locked room, the mysterious death of an evil figure, and, most of all, a moral balancing of the universe, which is the invariable lesson Abner draws from his detections. ....

I've always enjoyed these stories (the pictures are from my 1919 reprint of the book). It is indeed a pity that they are not more familiar.

First Things: America's Best Mystery Writer

A West Virginia author

At CrimeReads I happened across an essay, "Mystery's First Great Historian," about Howard Haycraft, author of, among other things, Murder for Pleasure (1941) and editor of The Art of the Mystery Story (1946). Browsing through the former (I own both) I came across Melville Davisson Post, author of the Uncle Abner short stories about which I have posted before. Post lived near Lost Creek, West Virginia, and so I expect he was acquainted with relatives of mine. Some of what Haycraft wrote about Melville Davisson Post:

Melville Davisson Post

Melville Davisson Post (1871-1930) was born near Clarksburg, West Virginia. He worked on his father's farm, attended rural schools, and received a degree in law from West Virginia University in 1892. Several years spent in the practice of criminal and corporation law in his native state gave him the background for The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896), a volume of short stories dealing with an unscrupulous lawyer who used his knowledge of legal loopholes to defeat justice. The book created something of a furor, moralists objecting that it gave too much advice to criminals. Post retorted in the preface to a sequel, The Man of Last Resort (1897), that nothing but good could come of exposing the law's defects. ....

The MASON stories qualify as detection only in an oblique sense, if at all. But there is no doubt that they helped to pave the way in Post's mind for UNCLE ABNER, whose sleuthing is of the purest ray. A rockhewn Virginia squire of the Jeffersonian era, whose position as protector of the innocent and righter of wrongs in his mountain community compelled him to turn detective with some of the most convincing results known to the short story form, UNCLE ABNER (who never appeared in a novel) had a long career in the popular magazines, beginning in 1911. The book collection of the tales, Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries, did not appear until 1918, but has been in print continuously ever since. ....

The ABNER stories are still read and re-read after more than a quarter-century less for the intensive plots of which their author was so proud—strikingly original in their time but mostly hackneyed by imitation to-day—than for the difficult-to-define quality that separates the sheep from the goats in any form of literature: in Post's case, as nearly as can be expressed, his richly sentient realization of character, place, and mood. ....

After the success of his early tales, Post abandoned the legal profession entirely for literature. The story of his later life is principally synonymous with his writing career, though he traveled extensively abroad and was active in the councils of the Democratic party at home. He fell from a horse at the age of fifty-nine and died two weeks later at his West Virginia home. ....

...ABNER'S detection in the final analysis nearly always hinges on character. It is his judgment of men's souls that leads him to expect and therefore to find and interpret the evidence, where lesser minds...see naught.

No reader can call himself connoisseur who does not know UNCLE ABNER forward and backward. His four-square pioneer ruggedness looms as a veritable monument in the literature. .... (Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, 1941, pp. 94-97)

Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post - Free eBook can be read online or downloaded at the link.

Uncle Abner

I am a native of West Virginia and although I didn't live there for more than a few months after I was born I did return every summer while I was growing up and periodically since then. My mother's family were early settlers in that part of Virginia that became West Virginia. My identification with the place is primarily familial and nostalgic and I have many friends with a less tenuous claim to familiarity. Nevertheless, when I come across some piece of history or literature related to the state I usually pay attention. Some years ago I discovered that one of the great American mystery writers was Melville Davisson Post, a West Virginian. I just downloaded several of his books from the Many Books site: Free ebooks by Melville Davisson Post. I noted that one of the stories in Dwellers in the Hills [1901] refers to Lost Creek, a West Virginia location familiar to me and to many of my Seventh Day Baptist friends. Many of Post's stories are set in the state. Post's most famous collection of mystery stories is Uncle Abner [1918] - about which I've posted before.

Joseph Bottum wrote

There is a case to be made that the Uncle Abner stories—the twenty-two tales of the Virginia hills written by Melville Davisson Post between 1911 and 1928—are among the finest mysteries ever written. .... [H]igh as Post's tales rank in general mystery fiction, they stand at the very top of the subgenre of religious mysteries. In the deliberate tone of the stories and the matching of the writing's pitch to its subject, in the uniting of the religious element with the detective's action and the sense of good's battle against evil in the solution of a crime, only G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown belongs beside Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner. ....

Uncle Abner is another of Post's books available, free, as an e-book for Kindle, Nook, and other electronic formats: Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post - Free eBook.

"The God of the hills"

Re-posted:

I am a native of West Virginia and although I didn't live there for more than a few months after I was born I did return every summer while I was growing up and periodically since then. My mother's family were early settlers in that part of Virginia that became West Virginia. My identification with the place is primarily familial and nostalgic and I have many friends with a less tenuous claim to familiarity. Nevertheless, when I come across some piece of history or literature related to the state I usually pay attention. Some years ago I discovered that one of the great American mystery writers was Melville Davisson Post, a West Virginian. I just downloaded several of his books from the Many Books site: Free ebooks by Melville Davisson Post. I noted that one of the stories in Dwellers in the Hills (1901) refers to Lost Creek, a West Virginia location familiar to me and to many of my Seventh Day Baptist friends. Many of Post's stories are set in the state. Post's most famous collection of mystery stories is Uncle Abner (1918) – about which I've posted before.

Joseph Bottum wrote

There is a case to be made that the Uncle Abner stories—the twenty-two tales of the Virginia hills written by Melville Davisson Post between 1911 and 1928—are among the finest mysteries ever written. .... [H]igh as Post's tales rank in general mystery fiction, they stand at the very top of the sub-genre of religious mysteries. In the deliberate tone of the stories and the matching of the writing's pitch to its subject, in the uniting of the religious element with the detective's action and the sense of good's battle against evil in the solution of a crime, only G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown belongs beside Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner. ....

Uncle Abner is another of Post's books available, free, as an e-book for Kindle and other electronic formats: Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post.

The American rival to Father Brown

Re-posted and slightly updated:

I am a native of West Virginia and although I didn't live there for more than a few months after I was born I did return every summer while I was growing up and every now and then since. My mother's family were early settlers in that part of Virginia that became West Virginia. My identification with the place is primarily familial and nostalgic and I have many friends with a less tenuous claim to familiarity. Nevertheless, when I come across some piece of history or literature related to the state I usually pay attention. Some years ago I discovered that one of the great American mystery writers was Melville Davisson Post, a West Virginian from that part of the state where my Bond ancestors dwelt. I just downloaded several of his books from the Many Books site: Free ebooks by Melville Davisson Post. I noted that one of the stories in Dwellers in the Hills (1901) refers to Lost Creek, a West Virginia location familiar to me and to many of my Seventh Day Baptist friends, including a cousin who now pastors the Seventh Day Baptist church there. Many of Post's stories are set in the state. Post's most famous collection of mystery stories is Uncle Abner (1918) — about which I've posted before.

Joseph Bottum wrote

There is a case to be made that the Uncle Abner stories—the twenty-two tales of the Virginia hills written by Melville Davisson Post between 1911 and 1928—are among the finest mysteries ever written. .... [H]igh as Post's tales rank in general mystery fiction, they stand at the very top of the sub-genre of religious mysteries. In the deliberate tone of the stories and the matching of the writing's pitch to its subject, in the uniting of the religious element with the detective's action and the sense of good's battle against evil in the solution of a crime, only G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown belongs beside Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner. ....

Uncle Abner is available, free, as an e-book for Kindle and other electronic formats: Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post. The picture is of my copy, a 1919 reprint.

Uncle Abner

In a post about early American detective fiction, "The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes," comes one I've posted about before:

Arguably the most original of all the American detectives of this period, Uncle Abner was the creation of the lawyer and author Melville Davisson Post. Post’s God-fearing hero appeared in 22 stories, written between 1911 and 1928. Riding through the backwoods of West Virginia in the years before the American Civil War, he dispenses justice and wisdom under the admiring gaze of the narrator, his young nephew Martin. Although largely forgotten today, the Uncle Abner stories have had many admirers over the years since their first publication. In 1941, Howard Haycraft, one of the first literary critics to take crime fiction seriously, called Post’s character ‘the greatest American contribution’ to the cast list of detective fiction since Poe’s C Auguste Dupin.

Post's dedication in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries:

 

"The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes"

"The only sin which cannot be forgiven"

A long essay by Joseph Bottum, "God and the Detectives," considers the religious detective story. Among those that he finds successful are many of Chesterton's Father Brown stories and Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner stories. He also cites several detective novels, among which is one of my favorites, Marjorie Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke.

.... A detective story is religious if it superadds an awareness of redemption to the fallen world assumed by all mysteries. If it sees the chance of God's grace down in a universe of sin.

That's what makes Chesterton's Father Brown and Post's Uncle Abner more than just intuitive detectives who happen to use religiously gained knowledge in their pattern recognition. It's what makes Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand so interesting, and P.D. James' Death in Holy Orders seem a thick narrative.

For that matter, it's what makes Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke the archetypal religious mystery novel, the story to which everyone should look for a model. The book owes more than a little to the thrillers of Graham Greene—those quickly written books he called his "entertainments." Stamboul Train (1932) and The Ministry of Fear (1943) are good examples: popular works that taught two generations of Catholic and High Anglican writers to indulge a kind of Christian moodiness, a brooding sense of original sin, and a not-entirely-happy knowledge of the metaphysical presence of God's moral law.

But as Allingham follows her tiger—Jack Havoc, a former commando on a crime spree as he hunts for a mysterious "treasure"—she sees more than just a world of sin. Oh, she opens her story in the fallen world of "the Smoke," which names for her both the London neighborhood through which Havoc rampages and the moral miasma that stains the city: "The fog slopped over its low houses like a bucketful of cold soup over a row of dirty stoves." And yet, even the tiger who stalks through that smoke is not purely malevolent. "Active evil is more incomprehensible in this two-part-perfect world than active good, and so it ought to be," Allingham wrote in an earlier book, and (as the reviewer David L. Vineyard has usefully noted) grace enters Havoc's murderous story through the conduit of a character named Canon Avril. He is a quiet churchman "with an approach to life which was clear sighted yet slightly off-center," and he tries to convince Havoc that he will eventually be destroyed by his belief that his luck allows him to do whatever he wants: "Evil be thou my Good, that is what you have discovered. It is the only sin which cannot be forgiven because when it is finished with you, you are not there to forgive."

In the end, when his luck at last runs out, Jack Havoc is offered grace one last time in the disappointment of the treasure, which proves not to be what he was seeking. The grace is one he refuses to understand or accept, but it's real nonetheless: a presence in the story, a deepening of the book, a thickening of the narrative. .... [more]

God and the Detectives | Books and Culture | A Christian Review