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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

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The Wrong Burglar

“Perhaps I should say the ‘wronged’ burglar,” said my friend Barrister —— (from whom I received the following narrative as we were steaming down from Albany last week behind the locomotive “Superior;”) “wronged, because he was legally convicted of one burglary, when he was only morally guilty of another.”

Returning from the Court of Appeals, we had been giving reminiscences of our early professional career. What preceded the story is unnecessary to recount.

“I had unsuccessfully defended him before Recorder Riker, nearly a quarter century since, for breaking into a Pearl Street store”—was the point at which I pursue my friend’s narrative. “The testimony fixed him in the vicinity of the crime, and he could not explain his presence there, nor could he give testimony of that good character which the Judges in Cancemi’s case have just held of such weight—so much so, that we shall never again convict men of a first offense! But he was not guilty, and why not I will tell” (continued H——,) [“]as I paraphrase his own story, narrated… 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?