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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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A Detective’s Experience

A Stolen Child

The Italian revolution was at its height. The mountain defiles were swarming with marauders, and the nobility had flocked to the capital, or sought refuge from Imperial avarice in another land. Those who preferred a life of freedom to the servility that attended submission sought refuge here. Among them was Cassina de Rita, in whose veins stirred the blood of the Colonas, and whose sword had been first in defense of his country’s outraged liberties and insulted honor. Young in years, he was old in fame; and when resistance was no longer of any avail, with his wife and child, he came to New Orleans. His wife was the daughter of a noble, high in rank and a soldier under the banner of Emanuel—an only child—sole heiress to his riches—her son the heir of his title. “Like our own war,” said Mr. F., “the Italian revolution had engendered fierce jealousies and family dissensions. Because the wife had adhered to the fortunes of her husband he disowned her—no rebel’s child, he said, should wear his coronet. To the exiled family these threats of the old noble mattered but little. Time, they thought, would appease his resentment, or, if it did not, they could rear a new heritage in the new land they had come to.

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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?