Melville Davisson Post, to be specific.
While looking up a related subject, I found this essay by Joseph Bottum which calls him “America’s Greatest Mystery Writer”. I am not sure I would be willing to go that far, but Bottum makes a good case, and I do admire what of Post’s work I’ve been able to find.
When I was a kid, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine would occasionally reprint one of the Uncle Abner stories. Later in life, I found a copy of the University of California collection he mentions and rediscovered Uncle Abner, who “belonged to the church militant, and his God was a war lord.”
I think the Abner stories appeal to me for the same reason Chesterton’s Father Brown stories do; the mixing of religion and reason, and the idea that one can believe in both God and the application of the human mind to solve the great mysteries. Post and Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, and others, to me fit in the great tradition of rationalist Christianity.
I am also particularly struck, and delighted, by the extended passage Bottum quotes (starting just after “The extraordinary passage…”) I, too, was struck by that passage when I read it; it hangs over my desk today, and I re-read it (along with Bolt’s line from Sir Thomas More: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide…?” and a few other select quotes) in times of great moral crisis.
“…whatever I may have to say of him hereafter I want to say this thing of him here, that his bigotry and his vanities were builded on the foundations of a man.” I admire the way he paints that word picture. “He stood up as though he stood alone, with no glance about him to see what other men would do. . . .”
I commend Bottum’s essay to your attention. He did write the “God and the Detectives” essay, which I am still reading and digesting, but which you may also care to read.
. (I’ve always liked Niven much better as a short story writer and essayist than as a novelist.)
