[citation needed] Uncle Abner solved the mysteries that confronted him in a backwoods West Virginia community, immediately prior to the American Civil War and before the infant nation had any proper police system.
He had two great attributes for his self-imposed task: a profound knowledge of and love for the Bible, and a keen observation of human actions.
One example of Uncle Abner's keen deductive skills is his showing a deaf man had not written a document, because a word in it was phonetically misspelled.
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.
[4] In 1945, Signature, a stage adaptation by Elizabeth McFadden of an Abner short story, Naboth's Vineyard, lasted only two performances.