Melville Davisson Post

Melville Davisson Post (April 19, 1869–June 23, 1930) was an American author, born in Harrison County, West Virginia^[1]. His family settled in the Clarksburg, West Virginia area in the late 18th Century. He earned a law degree from West Virginia University in 1892, and was married in 1903 to Ann Bloomfield Gamble Schofield. Their one child died while an infant, and Mrs. Post died of pneumonia in 1919 which was very common during that period. He was an avid horseman, and died on June 23, 1930, after a fall from his horse, and was buried in Harrison County.^[2] His boyhood home, "Templemoor", was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.^[3]

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 Post. Post's best-known character is the mystery-solving, justice dispensing Virginian backwoodsman, Uncle Abner. Post also created two other recurring characters, Sir Henry Marquis and Randolph Mason. He also wrote two non-crime novels.

Uncle Abner

Uncle Abner is the best-known literary creation of Melville Davisson Post. Uncle Abner solved the mysteries that confronted him in a backwoods Virginia community, in the first years of the nineteenth century, before the infant American 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.

Bibliography

• The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (Putnam, 1896)
• The Man of Last Resort (Putnam, 1897)
• The Corrector of Destinies (Clode, 1908)
• 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)
• Monsieur Jonquelle (Appleton, 1923)
• Walker of the Secret Service (Appleton, 1924)
• 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)

References

1. ^ Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing by Rosemary Herbert (Oxford University Press, 2000)
2. ^ Sullivan, Ken (ed.), The West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Humanities Council, 2006. pg. 578
3. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2010-07-09. http://nrhp.focus.nps.gov/natreg/docs/All_Data.html. 

Norton, Charles A. Melville Davisson Post: Man of Many Mysteries. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1973.

External links

• Melville Davisson Post works available at the Internet Archive
• Works by Melville Davisson Post at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Melville Davisson Post in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Melville Davisson Post at Find a Grave

Persondata
Name	Post, Melville Davisson
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1869
Place of birth
Date of death	1930
Place of death