The Methods of Uncle Abner

Uncle Abner, a formidably righteous country squire of the hill region of pre-Civil War (West) Virginia, is the most memorable of a series of detectives created by Melville Davisson Post, one of the most accomplished Americans writing within the genre during the first part of this century. The Abner stories began appearing in magazines in 1911, and the first eighteen were collected in 1918 under the title *Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries*, a volume that Ellery Queen has ranked as one of the four finest collections of detective short stories ever published. It was Queen who announced the discovery that a second series of Abner tales had been published in *The Country Gentleman* in 1927 and 1928. "Utterly incredible as it may seem," he wrote, "none of the tales in this second series has ever appeared in book form — a prodigious publishing pity." Here, then, is the second Uncle Abner collection, a novelet and three stories making their long-awaited appearance in book form. They are for the most part equal in conception and execution to the first eighteen stories, with Abner unchanged, still a warlord in the Army of God, riding forth on his chestnut horse to do battle with the forces of evil. He remains a figure so heroic in stature that he seems more a product of American folklore than the creation of a single intellect.