Melville Davisson Post

Melville Davisson Post

About 1919
Born (1869-04-19)April 19, 1869
Harrison County, West Virginia, USA
Died June 23, 1930(1930-06-23) (aged 61)
Harrison County, West Virginia
Nationality American
Occupation Author, lawyer

Melville Davisson Post (April 19, 1869 – June 23, 1930) was an American author, born in Harrison County, West Virginia.[1]

Although Post's name is not immediately familiar to those outside 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] He also wrote several non-crime novels. His total output was approximately 230 titles.[4]

Biography

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] and his family had settled in the Clarksburg, West Virginia area in the late 18th century.[4]

Post earned a law degree from West Virginia University in 1892. 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. Post, an avid horseman, died on June 23, 1930 after a fall from his horse, and was buried in Harrison County.[6] His 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 having appeared in 22 stories that were serialized in American newspapers (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][11]

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][11]

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).

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing by Rosemary Herbert (Oxford University Press, 2000)
  2. 1 2 3 4 Bottum, Joseph (May 1, 2007). "America's Greatest Mystery Writer". FirstThings.com. First Things. Retrieved November 13, 2013.
  3. 1 2 Nevins, Francis M. (2014). "From Darwinian to Biblical Lawyering: Melville Davisson Post". Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law: Exploring the Legal Dimensions of Fiction and Film. Perfect Crime Books. pp. 12–60. ISBN 9781935797692.
  4. 1 2 Moore, Charles F. (8 December 2015). "Melville Davisson Post". e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  5. 1 2 Routledge, Christopher (2012). "Post, Melville Davisson (1869-1930)". In Powell, Stephen. 100 American Crime Writers. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 281–282. ISBN 9781137031662. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  6. ↑ Sullivan, Ken (ed.), The West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Humanities Council, 2006. pg. 578
  7. ↑ Staff (2010-07-09). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
  8. ↑ Mallory, Michael (2005). "'The Man of Last Resort': the Outrageous World of Randolph Mason". Mystery Scene Fall (91). Retrieved 1 January 2016.
  9. ↑ Loerzel, Robert. "The Corpus Delicti". Alchemy of Bones. Archived from the original on 2 January 2016. Retrieved 2 January 2016.
  10. ↑ Brown, Patricia J. (2010). "The Image of the Attorney: The Character of Attorney Randolph Mason in three books by Melville Davisson Post". Selected Works. Bepress. Retrieved 2 January 2016.
  11. 1 2 Moore, Charles F. (5 December 2010). "Uncle Abner". e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Retrieved 5 January 2016.

External links

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