THE QUINTESSENTIALLY American mystery writer Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930), born in West Virginia and a graduate of West Virginia University, who went on to practice law and engage in Democratic politics, surprisingly set many of his stories in England. Sir Henry Marquis, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, appears in The Sleuth of St. James’s Square (1920) and The Bradmoor Murder (1929). A middle-aged Englishman who seems more like an outdoorsman than a policeman, he is a Londoner who directs secret service operations in many faraway places, including Asia and the United States.
The first mysteries by the inventive Post feature Randolph Mason, an unscrupulous lawyer whose last name was given to an honest one by Erle Stanley Gardner when he created Perry Mason. Post’s brilliant innovation gave a fresh look to crime stories. In the past, crooks had been concerned mainly with eluding capture but, in the hands of Randolph Mason, the focus is on avoiding punishment. Since the law is quite specific about what it defines as a crime, Mason finds tiny exceptions and gets his client off. Since Mason’s cases are all based on actual legal loopholes, moralists feared that Post’s stories would serve as handbooks for the villainous. For example, in “The Corpus Delecti,” the first story in the first Mason collection, The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896), Mason tells his client that the only solution to his problem is for him to kill his wife. The story, and others that followed, spurred much-needed changes in criminal prosecution.
“The Bradmoor Murder” was first published as a three-part serial in The Pictorial Review in 1922; it was first collected in The Bradmoor Murder (New York, Sears, 1929); it was titled The Garden in Asia in England.