Nationality American Role Author | Name Melville Post Occupation Author, lawyer | |
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Born April 19, 1869 ( 1869-04-19 ) Harrison County, West Virginia, USA Died June 23, 1930, Clarksburg, West Virginia, United States Books Uncle Abner, Randolph Mason: Corrector, Dwellers in the Hills, The Strange Schemes, The Corpus Delicti | ||
Education West Virginia University | ||
The Corpus Delicti, part 1, by Melville Davisson Post
Melville Davisson Post (April 19, 1869 – June 23, 1930) was an American author, born in Harrison County, West Virginia. 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. The 22 Uncle Abner tales, written between 1911 and 1928, have been called some of "the finest mysteries ever written".
Contents
- The Corpus Delicti part 1 by Melville Davisson Post
- Early life and education
- Personal life
- Death
- Legacy
- Randolph Mason
- Uncle Abner
- Other characters
- References
Post's other recurring characters include the lawyers Randolph Mason and Colonel Braxton, and the detectives Sir Henry Marquis and Monsieur Jonquelle. His total output was approximately 230 titles, including several non-crime novels.
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). Post's family had settled in the Clarksburg, West Virginia area in the late 18th century, and 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. 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.
Legacy
Post's boyhood home, "Templemoor", was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
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.
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. 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.
Uncle Abner
Uncle Abner is Post's best-known literary creation, the character, one of six detectives created by Post, 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.
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.
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).