Melville Davisson Post

• Born: April 19, 1869
• Birthplace: Romines Mills, West Virginia
• Died: June 23, 1930
• Place of death: Clarksburg, West Virginia

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; historical; espionage; police procedural; thriller

Principal Series: Randolph Mason, 1896-1908; Uncle Abner, 1911-1918; M. Jonquelle, 1913-1923; Sir Henry Marquis, 1915-1920; Captain Walker, 1920-1929; Colonel Braxton, 1926-1930

Contribution

Melville Davisson Post’s crime and detective fiction followed basic conventions of the puzzle mystery. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Post’s series characters generally repudiate tough-guy violence in favor of detached, superior rationality to pierce the mystery and restore social order. Post wrote short fiction for a variety of popular magazines. Although often using the inflated language of melodrama, his stories nevertheless evoked horror and suspense and convincingly used surprise endings. Through the use of series characters, he sought to give novelistic continuity and organic form to published collections of stories, which first appeared separately in family magazines; most of his fiction underwent that transformation. A superlative entertainer, Post would have been quite comfortable writing scripts for presentation on radio, film, or television.

Biography

Melville Davisson Post was born on April 19, 1869, into a prosperous landed family that took pride in its participation in the American Revolution and the development of West Virginia. Post grew up knowing horses, cattle, the outdoors, frontier character, folklore, and traditional values. This knowledge provided him with literary matter and the youth’s perspective he used in many of his narratives.

After completing a law degree at the University of West Virginia in 1892, Post started a short-lived career in law and politics; this activity gave him the knowledge of legal subtleties on which his first series depended. The success of his series encouraged him to move away from the law and to continue the development of series detective stories. He developed six different series protagonists between 1896 and 1930; during that time, his fiction appeared in such magazines as Pearson’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Metropolitan, Hearst’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal.

Post and his wife, Ann, lived fashionably, enjoying the activities of resort life at Bar Harbor and Newport and their frequent European travels. Their lifestyle engendered the international perspective and flair for the exotic that appears in the Sir Henry Marquis and M. Jonquelle series, as well as the nostalgic return to the past of the West Virginia hill country in the Uncle Abner and Colonel Braxton series.

World War I saw the Posts return to live outside Clarksburg, West Virginia, in a house called The Chalet, built in the design of Swiss Alpine houses and furnished with pieces from their European travels. There, Post maintained a polo ground and ponies. After the death of his wife in 1919, Post traveled less but continued to write fiction. He died in Clarksburg on June 23, 1930, from injuries sustained in a fall from a horse.

Analysis

In the introduction to his first series collection, The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896), Melville Davisson Post established his fiction’s fundamental characteristics. There he pointed out the writer’s obligation as an entertaining “magician” to relieve the audience from the tedium of the commonplace. Post saw little contradiction between that charge and adherence to the puzzle-mystery convention as established by Poe and Doyle, for the puzzle is the universal paradigm of the human encounter with experience: “The human mind loves best the problem.” Every new generation has a fresh experience of the puzzle of meaning lying beneath the surface.

Post found novelty variously. He adapted puzzle-mystery conventions to the new generation of American readers who, as he did, remembered the agrarian past and looked forward to the future. Often, the narrative point of view belongs to an adolescent male who seeks meaning by observing the mature male (the detective); Post’s fiction often synthesizes the initiation story and the mystery plot. The author also sought novelty by finding ever more ingenious ways to move toward unsuspected and satisfying resolutions.

The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason

In The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, Post collected stories marked by novel changes on the puzzle-mystery conventions. The series character lives an aristocratic, solitary existence in private apartments, tended only by his man-of-all-work, Courtland Parks. Although Mason’s grossness of feature may suggest (to those who do not know him) craftiness, cynicism, and even brutality, seen truly, it is a face of “unusual power”—of mind, not body, for Mason suffers from an enervating illness that makes him unfit for ordinary life and forces his withdrawal from the world (as Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Holmes are monkish intellectuals). Yet as a lawyer of extraordinary intellect, Mason’s shadowy influence on New York City society is felt. All Post’s series detectives are variations on such characters of remote mental power.

Further reflecting convention, Mason’s relation to his man Parks is like that between the rationally superior detective and his inferior confidant. Parks becomes the physical agency of Mason’s mind; he communicates the lawyer’s advice to clients and checks on the progress of events. Unlike Dupin’s nameless confidant and Holmes’s Watson, however, Parks is not of the same social class as Mason. Nor does he engage in familiarities with his master as Bunter does with Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective fiction. Finally, he is not in the muscular mode of Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin, who with detective Nero Wolfe is a later variation on the mind-body division of labor.

Beyond these developments, Post served the principle of variety by introducing a shocking deviation in The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, for his Mason becomes the mastermind behind shady if not criminal conspiracies. As a preface, each story cites case law, with brief explanations, showing how justice may be evaded, and the stories serve as dramatic illustrations. The author’s justification for writing stories that seem to condone corruption of the law is artful and complex as well as (one suspects) an unsubtle defense of sensationalism. Post’s own legal experience had shown him that moral law and statute law were not synonymous and that the war of life generated battles in the courts between equally bad men who corrupted the law in self-interest. It is therefore the writer’s obligation, according to Post, to warn “the friends of law and order” through such instructive narratives as those in The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason.

The Man of Last Resort and The Corrector of Destinies

Despite Post’s stated purpose, the Mason stories fail to rise above the flatness of stereotype and the turgidity of melodrama. The second Mason collection, The Man of Last Resort: Or, The Clients of Randolph Mason (1897), continues in much the same vein as The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason. In The Corrector of Destinies (1908), Post rehabilitates Mason. He recovers “from his attack of acute mania” and now works “to find within the law a means by which to even up and correct every manner of injustice.” Despite their weaknesses, the stories gained an audience for Post, encouraging him to write full time. The stories possess strengths: the persuasive evocation of terror and suspense and an economy of style that moves plot toward direct resolutions.

Ten years separated the last Mason collection and the first Uncle Abner collection. During the interim, Post wrote two novels about the West Virginia hill country that do not belong to the detective genre, Dwellers in the Hills (1901) and The Gilded Chair (1910); a novel of mystery fantasy, The Nameless Thing (1912); and short detective fiction for The Saturday Evening Post, Metropolitan, Pictorial Review, Illustrated Sunday Magazine, and Redbook. These stories were later collected and published as Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (1918).

Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries

As Charles A. Norton has shown, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries received critical praise on its publication and has continued to do so. The series represents Post’s most successful writing in the detective-fiction genre, for it unites themes and characters about which the writer felt deeply with tightly controlled and persuasive narrative techniques. Separately, the stories possess the inner vitality of this organic unity; together, they achieve the effect of novelistic continuity—the effect for which Post always worked when he collected his various short-fiction series into single volumes. Nowhere did he achieve that end so well as in Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries.

A single narrative point of view helps unify the stories. The adolescent Martin observes and reports on the events in which his Uncle Abner (a self-designated detective) and his confidant Squire Randolph are central. In the boys’ adventure novel Dwellers in the Hills, Post had developed a similar character in its protagonist, Quiller. Because his older brother is bedridden, the child Quiller is given the task of herding cattle to market to fulfill a contract, despite the forestalling violence of rival herdsmen. Quiller is knowledgeable about horses and cattle but feels threatened by the opaqueness of the natural and human worlds. He is attracted to the perception of physical nature as mystery (Post tellingly introduces the folklore of powerful creatures who control the forests and rivers) and is kept from knowledge of human nature because the adults of his world do not explain the tensions lying beneath the surface (rivalries between and within families over wealth, passion, and violence; the weakness of law on the frontier; the secrets of human sexuality). Like Quiller, young Martin of Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries seeks understanding and lives in an anxiety born of ignorance. The physical positions Post assigns to Martin further suggest the character’s fear and longing: He peeps from lofts and through windows and overhears from porches and behind hedgerows the deeds and words of Uncle Abner.

Although his character may derive from the superdetective of remote intellectual superiority, Abner’s fullness of character comes from the way in which Post defines the cattleman-detective in the complex matrix of his culture. Abner believes in personal courage, the demystification of experience through common sense, the providential ordering of history, adherence to the Judeo-Christian ethic, and the progress of the American system toward justice. Post’s success in showing rather than telling about Uncle Abner is largely a product of the narrative viewpoint; the boy Martin looks, listens, and records but does not explain beyond his understanding.

Yet the stories also benefit richly from the control of style. The writing is simple, direct, without Post’s habitual excess of melodramatic language. Nevertheless, it is poetic and redolent of atmosphere, the product of complexly related, antithetical images: supernaturalism and naturalism, mystery and knowledge, terror and safety The narratives move surely, economically from the firmly established snarl of complication to the snap of release.

The relation of ideal to real justice seems central to the detective’s work. In the service of the ideal, he may sacrifice the real, as in “An Act of God,” which tells of the revenge exacted by a circus performer whose daughter has been impregnated and abandoned by a cattle shipper named Blackford. The circus artist carries out Blackford’s murder, making it seem accidental, and it is legally adjudged “an act of God.” Seeing through the ruse, Uncle Abner confronts the performer and analyzes the crime. In view of Blackford’s evil and the fact that the performer’s granddaughter would be left alone and impoverished if he were charged, however, Abner chooses to leave the case in God’s hands.

Nevertheless, Abner always works to unite the ideal with the real, as “The Wrong Hand” shows. Martin has been sent on an errand from which he is returning late because his horse has broken a shoe. He meets Uncle Abner, on his own private mission; because of the deepening winter night and threatening weather, Abner takes his nephew in charge. They enter the house of a man named Gaul, widely known because of his hunchback and bitterness. One wife went mad; another was found by Abner’s drovers “on a summer morning[,] swinging to the limb of a great elm that stood before the door, a bridle-rein knotted around her throat and her bare feet scattering the yellow pollen of the ragweed.”

Post shades in details masterfully. The unnatural Gaul sits before the fireplace with a cane that has a gold piece in its head so his “fingers might be always on the thing he loved.” The grotesque recognizes Martin’s fear but reassures him by asserting that he has no wish to frighten children, that it was “Abner’s God” who twisted his body. Gaul and Abner talk about the marketing of cattle, a seemingly ordinary conversation, but one in which the hunchback’s hate, self-pity, paranoia, and greed are revealed. The storm grows more severe, the rain turning into “a kind of sleet that rattled on the window-glass like shot,” while the wind “whooped and spat into the chimney.” When the conversation turns to religion and Gaul begins to blaspheme, Abner tells Martin that he must go to sleep. The boy is wrapped in his uncle’s greatcoat; feigning obedience, Martin watches and listens from his hiding place. He senses his uncle’s grave intention.

A terrible death has recently occurred in Gaul’s house. His brother was found dead, having apparently killed himself with a knife. Gaul, rather than the victim’s own children, has received the inheritance. Having examined the body of evidence the judicial committee used to make the finding of suicide, Abner knows that Gaul has murdered his own brother.

In the subtle interrogation Martin overhears from the greatcoat, Uncle Abner seeks a confession from Gaul through innocent, circular, philosophical questioning. It is the pattern Post assigns to Uncle Abner in other of the series stories. Abner intends to right Gaul’s injustice to his brother’s children as well as see that the man is charged with murder. Outlining the clues, he comes at last to the fact that a bloody handprint on the dead brother’s right hand came from a right hand, a clear impossibility, unless a murderous second party was present. His resistance broken, Gaul confesses to the murder and agrees to sign over the deed of inheritance to his brother’s children. At dawn, uncle and nephew ride away,

with the hunchback’s promise that he would come that afternoon before a notary and acknowledge what he had signed; but he did not come—neither on that day nor on any day after that.

When Abner went to fetch him he found him swinging from his elm tree.

Later Works

In some individual stories that followed this series, Post achieved again the superiority of the Uncle Abner stories, though never with consistency. One reason for his lack is that he did not often work again with the synthesis of boy’s adventure, detective story, and regional history that sparked Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries. In the magazine fiction and collections that followed, the author introduced four series detectives (Sir Henry Marquis, M. Jonquelle, Captain Walker, and Colonel Braxton) and continued to enjoy a success based on his control of suspenseful narrative. Yet all the detectives are really only one character: the intelligent, remote, resourceful, highly placed police official. The arena is national and international life. The detective works behind the scenes through disguise and secret conspiracy. In “The House by the Loch” (a Sir Henry Marquis story), Post achieved the richness of the Uncle Abner stories, largely by resorting again to a child narrator. In Walker of the Secret Service (1924), the opening six stories return to the point of view of a boy, a naïve narrator who recounts his abortive criminal career under the guidance of two failed train robbers. Seeking unity, Post makes an improbable biographical connection between the boy of these stories and the Captain Walker of the remainder. Despite such lapses, however, as an entertainer, Post rarely failed.

Principal Series Characters:

• Randolph Mason is an aristocratic New York City lawyer and omniscient, shadowy force. A recluse, he serves only clients who come to him as a last resort; they receive counsel that, taking advantage of legal loopholes, urges them to unethical if not criminal acts. Later, mellowing, he restricts his practice to unfortunate victims of the legal system.
• Uncle Abner , a cattle rancher and outdoorsman on the old Virginia frontier, is a middle-aged, fatherly protector and wise philosopher. He involves himself directly in the resolution of rural crime and mystery. His analyses rest solidly on superior ratiocination, biblical ethics, and the law and spirit of the American constitution.
• M. Jonquelle , the préfect of police in Paris and an international cop, travels to London, Washington, D.C., and other locales to uncover acts of crime or espionage that imperil international security.
• Sir Henry Marquis , the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, is a renowned criminologist and master of abstruse knowledge. He wins battles of wits with archcriminals whose espionage or criminal activities might otherwise have international consequences.
• Captain Walker , the chief of the United States Secret Service, as a youth pursued a life of crime. As chief, he records or resolves cases renowned because of the bizarre, unforeseen ends to which evil comes.
• Colonel Braxton is a mature Virginia lawyer whose country-town wisdom, gained from life and knowledge of the law, leads him successfully through courthouse dramas that unravel criminal acts.

Bibliography

Hubin, Allen J. Introduction to The Complete Uncle Abner. San Diego: University of California, 1977. Hubin provides both the critical introduction and an annotated bibliography to this collection of the Uncle Abner mysteries.

Norton, Charles A. Melville Davisson Post: Man of Many Mysteries. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974. Study of Post’s life and work. Includes extensive bibliography of Post’s writing, as well as of writing about him.

Norton, Charles A. “The Randolph Mason Stories.” The Armchair Detective 6 (October, 1972): 86-96. Overview of Post’s tales of an unethical attorney manipulating the law.

Panek, LeRoy Lad. The Origins of the American Detective Story. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Study of the beginnings and establishment of American detective-fiction conventions, focusing especially on the replacement of the police by the private detective and the place of forensic science in the genre. Sheds light on Post’s work.

Peters, Ellis. Foreword to Historical Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997. The well-known practitioner of historical crime fiction comments on Post’s entry in the subgenre.

Van Dover, J. K., and John F. Jebb. Isn’t Justice Always Unfair? The Detective in Southern Literature. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Critical examination of the narrow tradition of southern detective fiction and the distinctive contributions of southern authors to the mystery genre. Includes a chapter on Post and Irvin S. Cobb.

Williams, Blanche Colton. “Melville Davisson Post.” In Our Short Story Writers. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. Profile of Post emphasizing his prowess as a crafter of short fiction.