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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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An Evening with a Detective

by James Franklin Fitts

An Alibi

If there is anything more calculated to sharpen a man’s wits, and keep him continually on the lookout than the detective’s business, I don’t know what it can be. A few years of the life that we in this peculiar business have to lead makes it a man’s second nature to be watchful without seeming to be so at all, and to take notice of what is going on even when not engaged on any particular “lay,” as the rouges say. I have two little stories to tell which will illustrate this.

One Sunday, about ten years ago, I found myself at Carlisle, a flourishing town on the Blank and Blank Railroad. I was considerably acquainted there, and had been there pretty often on business; but my being there at this time was the result of an accident merely. I had been three hundred miles west of this, trying in vain to find a clue to the whereabouts of an absconding defaulter; and coming back to take a fresh start, I found that a flood had submerged the track for several miles east of Carlisle, and that there would be no getting away till Monday, at the least. So I made a virtue of necessity, and telegraphing my detention and its cause to my family, I went up town.

After dinner at the hotel, I dropped in at the office of the district attorney, with whom I was well acquainted. I found him arranging the details of a number of criminal cases which were to be tried at the court which began the following Monday.

“Anything of importance?” I asked, rather carelessly.

“One, at least,” he replied. “Joe Slifer, a notorious scoundrel, is to be tried for highway robbery. The victim was dragged out of his buggy on a lonely road, beaten insensible, and robbed of a thousand dollars. He identifies Slifer positively as one… 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?