The News

Web Site Showcases
American Detective Fiction

Posting all Detective Fiction
Prior to Conan Doyle

Fully Searchable

The mission of the Westminster Detective Library to catalog and make available online all the short fiction dealing with detectives and detection published in the United States before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891).

This site grew out of research for the anthology Early American Detective Stories (McFarland 2008) that I edited with my mentor and colleague LeRoy Lad Panek (1943-2021), winner of two Edgar awards for his contributions to the scholarly field of detective criticism. We uncovered a treasure-trove of forgotten and previously unavailable detective stories, many more than could be included in a single anthology. And so this on-going project was born.

The site includes a working bibliography; full-text copy of entries are added as they are prepared. A few stories that were published in Britain but which appear to have been previously published in America have also been included and are indicated by an asterisk in the bibliography. I welcome comments and solicit both additional bibliographical entries and texts.

Mary M. Bendel-Simso, editor

Select Story

The Highwayman

by Thomas Waters

About the period when I received my first actual “detective” appointment, a most singular circumstance occurred in connection with a class of offences which was believed to be dying out—namely, highway robbery; but which had the effect of fully awakening public attention to the proceedings of the “knights of the road.”

Although not a part of my own experience, yet I received it from the lips of one of the principal “parties” in the affair, whose words I use.

Great changes had been for some time taking place in the speed and the general appointments of stage-coaches. The days of the “York Fly,” which went at about the rate of that well known insect, were numbered, and the conventional Salisbury wagon was very nearly obsolete. Men with means and enterprise were setting up fast coaches, well horsed, and well appointed, and well driven, so that traveling assumed a very different aspect to what it had for so many years presented. The post office contracts were more stringent and, under penalties, those proprietors of coaches who undertook to carry his majesty’s mails were compelled to reach certain towns at certain periods.

Among the most noticeable of those new and well-appointed conveyances was the Warwick mail. This was a well-appointed four-horse coach, that went from St. Martin’s le Grand to the town or city of Warwick. It was believed that the coach belonged to a firm of Quakers, from the frequency with which one or other of the broad-brimmed fraternity travelled by the Warwick mail.

But with all its comfort, with all its speed, with all its punctuality, there was something connected with the mail which gave it an unenviable reputation. No coach was more frequently, or indeed, anything like so frequently, stopped by highwaymen. At all points of its journey it seemed to be specially subjected… Read More

Miscellany

The Detective of the Present -- Finn and Jourdan

Time was when a detective was a man who detected things. A detective is still that in some European countries; and he still detects things—in novels. There's Buckett in “Bleak House” who detects Lady Dedlook, and there's that detective in Collin’s story of the “Moon Stone,” quite a detector. New York used to have Old Hayes, who could detect a thing or two; Paris has had Vidocq, and Bow street has had Forster.* But the race has died out entirely in America, and is dying out in England.

Commissioner Jourdan, of Brooklyn, has been making an effort to raise up a detective or two and has actually produced Corr and Bill. Corr and Bill were raised to the Vidocquian task of tracing a mystic murder. Finnan is a hatter; and Finnan has been in States Prison. That ought to be enough for any detective such as Corr to concluded that Finnan did the deed. Edgar A. Poe could not reason out a conclusion clearer than that. So Corr went to where Finnan was making hats.

Is Finnan here? Yes—want to see him?