Uncle Abner - (Library of Congress Crime Classics) by Melville Davisson Post (Paperback)

About the Book

"How could a murderer come through a closed window, without disturbing the cobwebs? How can a dead man and his horse be made to vanish? How could thieves creep through an ordinary keyhole to steal a hoard of gold? This famous collection chronicles the exploits of Uncle Abner, a powerful mind and moral figure in the wilderness and frontier territories of the Appalachians. Set in the 1840s and 1850s in what is now West Virginia, these stories profile the detective as seen through the eyes of his young nephew. With a combination of shrewd deductive skill, uncanny intuition, and keen powers of perception, Uncle Abner deftly exposes evil and evildoers"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

First published in 1918, this collection of tales of Abner's investigations, told by his nephew and chronicled by the prolific Melville Davisson Post, was hailed as the most important volume of American crime fiction since the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

"It is a world...filled with the mysterious justice of God!"

The titular Uncle Abner is a man with extraordinary powers of observation, a close reader of the Bible, and a towering code of morality, and he does not shy from taking matters into his own hands when the law is too slow or too blind to dispense justice. A landowner in nineteenth-century West Virginia, Abner is a fountainhead of God's wisdom and justice for the territory. Post's stories and novels were highly popular, appearing in national magazines and book form. Though the stories are little read today, there is nothing old-fashioned about the terrible crimes committed in the backwoods or Abner's extraordinary skills as an observer of men and evil.

Review Quotes

"An indispensable collection that's no more dated than it was a century ago."--Kirkus Reviews