The Magazine

Melville Davisson Post

America's greatest mystery writer

Jul 31, 2000, Vol. 5, No. 43 • By J. BOTTUM
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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 from 1911 to 1928 -- are among the finest mysteries ever written.


Ellery Queen certainly thought so, calling the stories "an out-of-this-world target for future detective-story writers to take shots at." In Cargoes for Crusoes, a failed 1924 attempt to teach literary critics about the quality of popular magazine fiction, Grant Overton called the 1914 appearance of Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery" a major literary event. In a later survey of the genre -- the 1941 Murder for Pleasure, a book that succeeded where Overton's had failed in convincing critics to take mysteries more seriously as literature -- Howard Haycraft declared that Uncle Abner was, after Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, "the greatest American contribution to the form." When William Faulkner, discouraged by slow sales of his highbrow fiction, tried his hand at thrillers, Post was the model to which he turned.


High as Post's stories rank in the broad genre of mystery fiction, however, they stand alone at the 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, not even G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown -- the only arguable rival -- belongs beside Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner.

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