UNCLE ABNER

Eighteen cases, originally published between 1911 and 1916 and first collected in 1918, starring the largely forgotten hero long regarded as the greatest detective in American fiction since Dupin.

It’s no wonder that Leslie S. Klinger, in his introduction, asserts, “What makes Uncle Abner so powerful is Post’s invention of a larger-than-life character.” The narrator Martin’s Uncle Abner, a rough-hewn West Virginian of the mid-19th century, speaks and acts with the authority of a biblical prophet or of Oliver Cromwell, to whom he’s repeatedly compared. Post’s plots are often formulaic, though the formula is unique to him: A mysterious crime is committed; witnesses explain the background circumstances of the theft or murder at hand; Abner, opaque and menacing, starts a dialogue with a single suspect to whom he plays grand inquisitor, eventually confronting that suspect with irrefutable proof of his or her guilt. Although Post varies this formula in “The Straw Man” and “The Edge of the Shadow,” however, his greatest achievement is the variety of uses to which he puts it without changing it. In “A Twilight Adventure,” Abner interrupts a lynching of suspected cattle thieves and turns the case upside down; in “The Concealed Path,” Abner’s impromptu invitation to a wedding leads him to confront a murder suspect who fights back so vigorously that his energy rivals Abner’s; in “Naboth’s Vineyard,” Abner rouses his entire community against an unsuspected killer. The finest of these stories, both of them frequently anthologized, are “The Age of Miracles,” in which Abner fights on behalf of an unjustly disinherited young woman, and “The Doomdorf Mystery,” an impossible crime worthy of John Dickson Carr. Klinger provides extensive and often necessary glosses on archaic language and historical and scriptural references.

An indispensable collection that’s no more dated than it was a century ago.