Some weeks ago I did a post that was almost nothing but the covers of fabulous vintage mysteries and a list of some of my favorite vintage authors. And that post was in response to a question asked by Sabine on an earlier post about being interviewed by the fabulous and hilarious Rachel X Russell.

So I’m dedicating today’s post to Elisabeth Grace Foley, who spoke up in the comments to recommend the nineteenth-century authors Anna Katherine Green and Melville Davisson Post.

I already knew about Green—although I had not read her (shame on me)—but Davisson Post’s name was a new one. So I immediately ran out and bought Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries: A Collection of Classic Detective Stories.

But first I had the following conversation with my husband:

Me: Uncle Abner? Are you kidding me? The cartoon character?

My husband: I don’t think it was a cartoon about mysteries.

Me: So this Davisson Post had a whole other double life—how brilliant is that?

My husband: Except Davisson Post was apparently born in 1869, and the L’il Abner cartoon ran until the 1970s.

Me: Holy crap! Talk about longevity!

Eventually he convinced me that Uncle Abner and L’il Abner were not the same character. And I started reading the mysteries.

Oh, so wonderful. . .

1. Doomdorf

   Anyone who can invent a name like Doomdorf has me on their side automatically. Now I’m in a terrible quandary because I desperately want to write a ghost story about a house called Doomdorf, but that name is already taken.

   Watch for a novel called Dorfdoom.

2. Historical setting

   Davisson Post was born only a few years after the end of the Civil War and lived his life in the back hills of Virginia, the land he knew so well and about which he wrote so vividly.

   His characters and stories ring true to life because they’re filled to the brim with details, habits, etiquette, and assumptions that could only possibly work in a world shaped entirely around them.

   When Uncle Abner and the boy-narrator ride through snow falling like great, grey, almost-sinister objects to cling to the branches of trees until they break, and they come upon a dilapidated old mansion with a single light burning and bang the knocker. . .the reader is not surprised that their reply is a gun report and splinters of wood flying through the door around them.

   We are purely delighted—here, indeed, is a mystery worth investigating!

   And when the narrator refers casually to the “disastrous failure of Prince Charles Edward Stuart to set up his kingdom in Scotland,” resulting in an influx of Scottish settlers in these Virginia hills whose ways and by-words Uncle Abner must understand in order to bring justice to a girl being married off against her will. . .again we are not surprised.

   Because Davisson Post speaks with such utter, detailed authority of his material, we are on the edge of our seats to learn what terrible secrets might lie hidden among these expatriates so far from home!

   And when the countryside teems with haggard women plaiting thorns to hide the wounds on their hands, and mortgages that can bought with gold coins in order to be forgiven, and insane old men who laugh demonically over having murdered abolitionists who would steal away their slaves. . .then we know we are not in our modern, automated, technological world at all.

   We are in Davisson Post country.

3. Punch lines

   But what makes Davisson Post’s stories live on indelibly in the reader’s mind is not even all this—although we might think this would be enough.

   It is that each story ends on its punch line.

   And then stops.

   This is high art, my friends. This is the perfect design for which we each, in our many and various approaches to storytelling, are always seeking.

4. Literary wisdom

   It is a law of the story-teller’s art that they do not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide them with the stimuli.
   —Melville Davisson Post, “The Doomdorf Mystery”

   If you study these lines long enough and hard enough, you’ll learn from them everything you ever need to know about creating literature.

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