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A twilight adventure

Many years ago, before the age of the internet, I picked up a collection of short stories called A Month of Mystery , edited by the film director Alfred Hitchcock. Most of the stories were humdrum, but one of them struck me as a masterpiece. It was by an American writer from the early 20th century named Melville Davisson Post. Although I never came across his writing again, his name stuck in my mind. Earlier this year, on a whim, I Googled him, and discovered that some of his works were still in print. I ordered a volume of his mystery stories, read them, and have been possessed by them ever since. More to the point, I have been thinking of how they could be used as a way of teaching doctors to examine own reasoning processes.

Davisson Post was a lawyer who gave up his career because of ill health before becoming a writer. By general agreement, his best writing appears in his so-called Uncle Abner stories.1 Each of these tales is written by a man named Martin, recalling events from his childhood, all of them centred on memories of a much loved uncle. Abner is a farmer, born not long after colonial times. A righteous, God-fearing man, he is endowed with wisdom and analytic judgement—a revered pillar of his community. Where there are crimes or mysteries to be solved, Abner is there, able to discern the truth among the lies and evasions of ordinary men's narratives.

Abner is often accompanied by a local magistrate, Squire Randolph. Unlike Abner, Randolph is learned in the law. A kind of Dr Watson figure to Abner's Sherlock Holmes, Randolph blunders into offering the obvious solution to every conundrum—and, inevitably, gets it wrong. …