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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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My Steady Pupil

“Now, Mr. Baker, let us understand each other at once,” Lord Hunsdon had said, leaning back in his official arm-chair, and tapping the massive signet-ring on his fat finger with the official paper-cutter, “I have the great pleasure, as I have said, of intrusting to you the task of my nephew’s education. All I have heard of you and what little I have seen of you induce me to regard you as an excellent travelling tutor. It only remains for me to state my views, as briefly as I can,”—here a glance at the official clock,— “for I have to receive a deputation immediately. Cecil Manvers has a fortune of his own—his mother’s money—and will in all probability succeed me in the title and property. I don’t want the boy to turn out a bookworm, a milksop, or a scamp. Make him a well-informed, honorable English gentleman, with enough knowledge of the world to steer clear of its worst perils, and I shall be more than satisfied. And nothing could conduce better to this than two years on the Continent in such good hands as yours, Mr. Baker. I shall see you again, of course, before you leave England, but just now”—another glance at the clock—“my time is positively not my own.”

And I took the Under-Secretary’s hint, and retired, almost tumbling over the excited deputation as I made my way downstairs. Next week Cecil Manvers and I went abroad.

Our first year of continental travel passed off pleasantly enough. I found my pupil not merely intelligent and quick to learn, but bright, frank, and unassuming, and singularly docile for so spirited a lad. The duties of what is… 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?