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Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries
Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries
Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries
Ebook293 pages4 hours

Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Uncle Abner, the most famous literary character created by Melville Davisson Post, is a righteous amateur detective, a keen observer of human actions with profound knowledge and love for the Bible. On his journeys around the backwoods of West Virginia, long before a proper police system is in place, he is confronted by murders and mysteries that cannot be ignored. He helps to solve them with his impressive intuition and deductive skills.

Abner's adventures are populated with peculiar characters and intriguing adventures set in the rough but fascinating land 'where men concealed their feelings as one conceals the practice of a crime; and one would have stolen his neighbor's goods before he would have intruded upon the secrecy of his emotions.'

This collection of eighteen stories, first published in 1918, with the pivotal character of justice-dispensing Uncle Abner connecting them all, is often considered among the most important American detective and crime fiction.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 7, 2013
ISBN9781448213177
Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries
Author

Melville Davisson Post

Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930) was a West Virginia author and attorney best known for his stories featuring Uncle Abner, an amateur detective and backwoodsman who solves mysteries and hands out justice in the years before the Civil War. Post’s other iconic creation is the amoral lawyer Randolph Mason, whose exploits on behalf of his criminal clients helped to establish the legal thriller genre. 

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Maybe 2½ stars. These short mystery stories are not mysteries in the contemporary sense - they aren't whodunits which the reader has a chance to figure out the culprit. Rather, they are crime stories which show the darker corners of human nature. Post's main character, Uncle Abner, was interesting but not enough for me to want to read more. The style was sort of a cross between Washington Irving and Arthur Conan Doyle, which I found trying at times. The setting was a bit muddled - in some of the stories, it is clearly before 1860 (there are still slaves & the region described is part of Virginia instead of West Virginia) while in others there are indications that it is supposed to be the 1890s ("200 years since the massacre of Glen Coe").
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent stories, really atmospheric; set in the backwoods of Virginia before the Civil War. According to Wikipedia, Post wrote 22 stories featuring Uncle Abner; this collection has 18; these are so good I think it worth the trouble to seek out the others.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Stories set in rural 19h century Virginia --though when is not clear --Ellery Queen describes it as being the" Jeffersonian Era" and Doomdorf in the famous and often-reprinted first story is said to have served with Iturbide in Mexico (c.1822) and does not appear to be more than middle-aged. But the next story contains obvious references to Reconstruction. Abner himself is a powerful character with a strong flavor of an oLd Testament prophet dispensing his own form of divine justice, backed by shrewd deductive powers --but I do not understand in "Angel of the Lord" why he gives a murderer a hundred dollars to flee the country with. The narrator is Abner's young nephew Marton, 9 years old at the time of that third story, though a very mature 9.

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Uncle Abner - Melville Davisson Post

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