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In recent books Mr. Post has allowed his fiction to follow him on his travels about the earth. The Mystery at the Blue Villa (1919) has settings in Paris, Nice, Cairo, Ostend, London, New York and Washington; the war of 1914-18 is used with discretion as an occasional background. Mr. Poe’s mysticism can be quickly perceived in certain stories; the tragic quality is ascendant in such tales as “The Stolen Life” and “The Baron Starkheim”; and humor is not absent from “Lord Winton’s Adventure” and “The Witch of Lecca.” A story of retributive justice will be found in “The New Administration.” The scenes of most of the episodes in The Sleuth of St. James’s Square (1920) are in America; the central figure about whom all the cases turn is Sir Henry Marquis, chief of the investigation department of Scotland Yard. The material is extremely colorful—from all over the world, in fact. Monsieur Jonguelle, Prefect of Police of Paris (1923) has the same characteristics with the difference of the central figure and with various settings. The reader will observe in these books that the narrative standpoint is altered from story to story; to take Monsieur Jonquelle, some of the tales are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the author. The reason for the selection inheres in each affair and is worth some contemplation as you go on. Walker of the Secret Service (1924) is pivoted upon a character who appears in “The Reward” in The Sleuth of St. James’s Square.
This new book of Mr. Post’s is a brilliant example of his technical skill throughout; it has also a special interest in the fact that the first six chapters are really a compressed novel. Walker, of the U. S. Secret Service, is introduced as a mere boy of vigorous physique who falls under the influence of two expert train robbers. The several exploits he had a share in are related with a steady crescendo of interest. At the end of the sixth chapter we have a clear picture of the fate of the two chiefs he served. The peculiar circumstances in which young Walker was taken into the Secret Service are shown; and the rest of the book records some of the famous cases he figured in. The motivation is that of Uncle Abner. “‘Crime always fails. There never was any man able to get away with it.... Sooner or later something turns up against which he is wholly unable to protect himself ... as though there were a power in the universe determined on the maintenance of justice.’”
Two of the most striking stories, “The Expert Detective” and “The ‘Mysterious Stranger’ Defense,” are developed from courtroom scenes—indeed, “The Expert Detective” is a single cross-examination of a witness. Probably this tale and one called “The Inspiration” must be added to the shorter roll of Mr. Post’s finest work, along with “The Corpus Delicti” and “The Doomdorf Mystery.”
The general method has been said, correctly, to combine the ratiocination of Poe’s stories with the dramatic method of the best French tellers of tales. The details of technique will bear and repay the closest scrutiny. But in certain stories Melville Davisson Post has put his high skill to a larger use than skill can accomplish; for those of his accomplishments an endowment and not an acquisition was requisite. When one says that of the relatively few American writers with that endowment in mind and heart he was able to bring to the enterprise in hand a skill greater than any of the others, one has indeed said all.