Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, by Melville Davisson Post

“Abner,” replied Dillworth, “how shall we know what justice is unless the law defines it?”

“I think every man knows what it is,” said Abner.

“And shall every man set up a standard of his own,” said Dillworth, “and disregard the standard that the law sets up? That would be the end of justice.”

“It would be the beginning of justice,” said Abner, “if every man followed the standard that God gives him.”

“But, Abner,” replied Dillworth, “is there a court that could administer justice if there were no arbitrary standard and every man followed his own?”

“I think there is such a court,” said Abner.

This passage, from a story entitled, “The Tenth Commandment,” in the book, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, by Melville Davisson Post (published 1918), encapsulates, in its moral libertarianism, much of what I found fascinating, and irritating, in this collection. I would like to recommend it for some readers, but have a hard time saying what kind of readers those might be.

“Uncle Abner” is a Virginian backwoodsman living some time in the early 19th Century (I was never able to work out exactly what period. The clues were all over the map.) Most of his stories are narrated by his hero-worshiping nephew (hence the “Uncle”). Abner is a Christian of unimpeachable (frankly overdrawn) integrity and intelligence, a man without official office who nevertheless acts as an investigator whenever a murder is discovered in the neighborhood. His reading of the human heart is infallible, his observations invariably correct, his judgments infallible.

He has little regard for human institutions of justice. When he discovers a murder he’s as likely to let the guilty party off as to turn him over to the authorities, sometimes on the basis of reasoning that seemed pretty obscure to me. He seems to believe that God’s justice is active and inescapable, not only in eternity but in the present, and regards himself as God’s instrument.

In short, he’s a man many of us would like to be, and is also kind of insufferable. In addition I think his theology weak (at one point he says that the devil “is very nearly equal, the Scriptures tell us, to the King of Kings.” The Scriptures tell us no such thing).

The puzzles are interesting, some of them noteworthy in the history of mystery writing. The stories reminded me of Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries, but were less didactic in terms of theology, and the characters less rounded.

I’d like to recommend this book to adults, but I suspect most readers (even Christians) will find them a touch naïve in terms of realism. I’d like to recommend them for children, but the depictions of black people (mostly slaves at that point in time in Virginia) are not the kind I’d like to see children exposed to.

So make your own judgment.

Hard-boiled Bulwer-Lytton

I enjoyed Phil’s link to this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Award finalists so much that I thought that instead of trying to say anything coherent tonight, I’d just craft my own opening for a detective novel I would rather undergo minor surgery than read.

Det. Dierdre Hamerstein was just finishing up the paperwork from tonight’s arrest, adjusting the sling in which the emergency medics had put her arm after the .45 shell had ripped through her shoulder, when Lieutenant Greese swung his pendulous belly through the office door with that familiar, “I’ve got a high-profile murder and I need to put my best detective on it, even if she is a girl and has lost three pints of blood tonight” look on his insensitive face.

As You Know, Bob, This List Ain't Bad

I remember a while back we talked about disliking novels with writers as main characters. They were too inspective, we said, or maybe we said “navel-gazing.” I don’t remember. Today, here’s a list of thirteen ways not to start your novel, which look pretty solid.

Now, if you want an example of how to start your great adventure novel (I know you’re writing one during your lunch breaks), roll your eyes over this baby: “From the limbs of ancient live oaks moccasins hung like fat black sausages — which are sometimes called boudin noir, black pudding or blood pudding, though why anyone would refer to a sausage as pudding is hard to understand and it is even more difficult to divine why a person would knowingly eat something made from dried blood in the first place — but be that as it may, our tale is of voodoo and foul murder, not disgusting food.”

Bestselling junk there (taken from this year’s list of Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest winners).

Criticizing the Rewriting of 'Porgy and Bess'

Terry Teachout writes about the strong criticism Stephen Sondheim has of a rewriting of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. “Rightly or wrongly, it’s become customary for a musical to undergo a fair amount of tinkering prior to being revived on Broadway. . . . But Porgy and Bess is no ordinary musical. It is, in fact, a grand opera . . .”

News item

The following news item is “fake but accurate,” in the finest tradition of American contemporary journalism.

WASHINGTON DC: As part of an ongoing effort to streamline government and make it more efficient, officials of the Justice Department announced today that, instead of publishing their annual multi-volume edition of the Statutes of the United States, they will instead publish a single, softcover book containing a list of things that aren’t regulated.

“There isn’t much in here, really,” said E. Cleveland Weckmeyer of the Attorney General’s office. “Basically you can have consensual sex with anybody you want, any way you want. Other than that, everything’s either illegal or you need a permit for it.”

A representative of the America Civil Liberties Union, Eleanore Rigby-Trotsky, when asked for her organization’s response said, “We’ll have to look into it more closely, but from what I hear I’d say we’re OK with it. Call me back in a half an hour.”

No fool he

The redoubtable Anthony Sacramone has been energized once again in his blogging at Strange Herring, which makes the world a sweeter and better place in so many ways. Today he reviewed the new film, “Our Idiot Brother.” He kind of liked it, but was not blind to its conceptual failings. Especially in the area of honesty, as seen through Hollywood eyes:

The moral of our story is that honesty is the best policy. And “openness” to others is the free-est form of expression. It sounds so simple and right. Except, well, this is Hollywood. And even its moralizing needs some desanitizing.

It’s possible to be so “open” to the other that one becomes a mere experiment in someone else’s “life journey.” One can also use “honesty” as a cover for merely being frank. You know the difference between being honest and being frank, right? Abraham Lincoln was honest. Adolf Hitler was frank.

The frank person makes no bones about the fact that he is robbing you, but insists that this “admission” also makes him honest. The frank person admits to cheating you, or cheating on you, and insists that needs must be met, and what about those banks and insurance companies and Wall Streeters?

To be honest means more than calling a spade a spade. It is also means more than mere earnestness. It is a a habit of mind, heart, and soul. It is a form of personal integration — integritas — that emanates from the center and not from attempting to Crazy Glue all the broken pieces back together with hollow apologies and confessions of being merely human.

Jacob's Voice in Literature

On D.G. Myers’ new blog, he talks about Jewish American Fiction.

As proud as I am to serve as an enforcer for the Jewish literary mafia, I think the real explanation for the sudden and prolonged prominence of American Jewish novelists is much simpler. They sound different from other American novelists. And the sounds they make, “the jumpy beat of American English​,” as Philip Roth​ once described it, are hard to resist. Other novelists sound laconic, if not sleepy, by comparison. American Jewish fiction is the fiction that is written in a distinctive voice — Jacob’s voice.