Melville Davisson Post was phonetically mis-spelt. Ellery Queen would later call the stories "an out-of-this-world target for future detective-story writers." In his 1924 book of literary criticism "Cargoes for Crusoes", Grant Overton called the publication of Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery" a "major literary event", and in "Murder for Pleasure" (1941), Howard Haycraft called Uncle Abner "the greatest American contribution" to the list of fictional detectives after Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. After Post's death, more stories about Abner were written (at the request of the Melville Davisson Post estate) by the retired American research chemist, John F. Suter (1914-1996). Besides Mason, Abner,
Police procedural gathering evidence, search warrants, interrogation and adherence to legal restrictions and procedure. The roots of the police procedural have been traced to at least the mid-1880s. Wilkie Collins's novel "The Moonstone" (1868), a tale of a Scotland Yard detective investigating the theft of a valuable diamond, has been described as perhaps the earliest clear example of the genre. As detective fiction rose to worldwide popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many of the pioneering and most popular characters, at least in the English-speaking world, were private investigators or amateurs. See C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Miss