Melville Davisson Post
| Melville Davisson Post | |
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Melville Davisson Post
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| Born | April 19, 1869 Harrison County, West Virginia, USA |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Harrison County, West Virginia |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Author, lawyer |
Melville Davisson Post (19 April 1869 – 23 June 1930) was an American author, born in Harrison County, West Virginia.[1] Although his name is not immediately familiar to those outside of specialist circles, many of his collections are still in print, and many collections of detective fiction include works by him. Post's best-known character is the mystery solving, justice dispensing West Virginian backwoodsman, Uncle Abner.[2] The 22 Uncle Abner tales, written between 1911 and 1928, have been called some of "the finest mysteries ever written".[2]
Post's other recurring characters include the lawyers Randolph Mason and Colonel Braxton, and the detectives Sir Henry Marquis and Monsieur Jonquelle.[3] His total output was approximately 230 titles, including several non-crime novels.[4]
Contents
Biography
Early life and education
Post was born on 19 April 1869 in Harrison County, West Virginia, the son of Ira Carper Post, a wealthy farmer; his mother was Florence May (née Davisson).[5] Post's family had settled in the Clarksburg, West Virginia area in the late 18th century, and [4] Post earned a law degree from West Virginia University in 1892.
Personal life
In 1903, he married Ann Bloomfield Gamble Schofield. Their only child (a son, Ira) died in infancy, after which Melville and Ann travelled in Europe. They later owned and managed a stable for polo ponies.[5] Ann died of pneumonia in 1919.
Death
Post, an avid horseman, died on June 23, 1930, after a fall from his horse, and was buried in Harrison County.[6]
Legacy
Post's boyhood home, "Templemoor", was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.[7]
Fiction
Randolph Mason
Post wrote three volumes of stories about Randolph Mason, a brusque New York lawyer who is highly skilled at turning legal loopholes and technicalities to his clients' advantage.[8]
In the first two volumes (The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason and The Man of Last Resort, published 1896-1897), Mason is depicted as an utterly amoral character who advises criminals how to commit wrongdoings without breaking the letter of the law. The best-known of these stories is "The Corpus Delicti", in which Mason's client murders a blackmailing lover and dissolves her dismembered corpse in acid. Despite circumstantial evidence, Mason secures his client's acquittal on the grounds that no body has been found and there are no eyewitnesses to the woman's death, as required by New York law at the time.[9] Post deflected criticism of such sensational stories by affirming that he was publicly exposing weaknesses in the law that needed to be rectified. Nevertheless, in a third volume (1908's The Corrector of Destinies), Mason had become a reformed man who used his knowledge of the law for more beneficent purposes. Post explained Mason's change of character by stating the lawyer had been suffering from mental illness in the two earlier volumes.[3][10]
Uncle Abner
Uncle Abner is Post's best-known literary creation, the character, one of six detectives created by Post,[11] having appeared in 22 stories that were serialized in American magazines (primarily The Saturday Evening Post) between 1911 and 1928. The first tale, "The Angel of the Lord", is perhaps the very first work in the historical mystery genre. Uncle Abner solved the mysteries that confronted him in a backwoods West Virginia community, immediately prior to the American Civil War and before the infant nation had any proper police system. He had two great attributes for his self-imposed task: a profound knowledge of and love for the Bible, and a keen observation of human actions. One example of Uncle Abner's keen deductive skills is his showing a deaf man had not written a document, because a word in it was phonetically mis-spelt.[2][12]
Ellery Queen would later call the stories "an out-of-this-world target for future detective-story writers." In his 1924 book of literary criticism Cargoes for Crusoes, Grant Overton called the publication of Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery" a "major literary event", and in Murder for Pleasure (1941), Howard Haycraft called Uncle Abner "the greatest American contribution" to the list of fictional detectives after Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin.[2][12]
Other characters
Post's other characters include Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard (The Sleuth of St James Square, 1920), the French policeman Monsieur Jonquelle (Monsieur Jonquelle: Prefect of Police of Paris, 1923), and the Virginia lawyer Colonel Braxton (The Silent Witness, 1930).
Works
- The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (Putnam, 1896) (available from Internet Archive)
- The Man of Last Resort (The Clients of Randolph Mason) (Putnam, 1897) (available from Internet Archive)
- Dwellers in the Hills (Putnam, 1901) (available from Project Gutenberg)
- The Corrector of Destinies (Clode, 1908) (available from Internet Archive)
- The Gilded Chair (Appleton, 1910) (available from Internet Archive)
- The Nameless Thing (Appleton, 1912)
- Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (Appleton, 1918) (available from Project Gutenberg of Australia)
- The Mystery at the Blue Villa (Appleton, 1919)
- The Sleuth of St. James Square (Appleton, 1920) (available from Project Gutenberg)
- The Mountain School-Teacher (Appleton, 1922) (available from Internet Archive)
- Monsieur Jonquelle (Appleton, 1923)
- Walker of the Secret Service (Appleton, 1924)
- Revolt of the Birds (Appleton, 1927)
- The Bradmoor Murder (Sears, 1929)
- published in Britain in 1929 as Garden in Asia by Brentano
- The Silent Witness (Farrar, 1930)
- The Methods of Uncle Abner (published posthumously by Aspen in 1974)
Notes
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- ↑ Sullivan, Ken (ed.), The West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Humanities Council, 2006. pg. 578
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References
- Norton, Charles A. (1973). Melville Davisson Post: Man of Many Mysteries. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
External links
- Works by Melville Davisson Post at Project Gutenberg
- Lua error in Module:Internet_Archive at line 573: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- Works by Melville Davisson Post at Hathi Trust
- Works by Melville Davisson Post at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Melville Davisson Post at Find a Grave
- Articles with hCards
- Articles with Internet Archive links
- 19th-century American novelists
- 20th-century American novelists
- American male novelists
- 1869 births
- 1930 deaths
- Writers from West Virginia
- People from Harrison County, West Virginia
- West Virginia University alumni
- Accidental deaths from falls
- Deaths by horse-riding accident
- Writers of historical mysteries
- 19th-century male writers
- American male short story writers
- 19th-century American short story writers
- 20th-century American short story writers
