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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 Burleigh Legacy

A Tale of an Amateur “Detective”

by Charles D. Gardette

My cousin, Phil Brentwood, was as good a fellow as ever lived—full of talent, courage, honor, and all the other virtues that cheer but not inebriate;—no, I don’t exactly mean that. However, the reader knows what I do mean, and so let it pass.

But Phil had a foible amounting almost to a monomania. He was, so to speak, an amateur felon. Not that he ever committed a crime “for the love of the thing,” or for any other motive. Oh, no! But he was exceedingly fond of perusing the court reports, and of revising and correcting, as it were, the plans and executions of celebrated robberies, arsons, murders, and the like, with the view of discovering their weak points—showing how and where the perpetrators failed to assure the successful accomplishment of their purposes and to elude subsequent detection. His ingenuity in these matters was wonderful, and he certainly would have made a remarkable leader of a band of outlaws, or a singularly adroit and infallible detective officer, had either of these antipodal careers been in his line. But, being a man of honor and virtue, and a gentleman of easy fortune and high social station, he remained simply a commentator—a philosophical censor, in a manner, of the criminal calendar, and a critical looker-on in the Vienna of outlawry.

Brentwood was a constant subscriber to and diligent reader of most of the “organs of justice” in the civilized world. He received the English police and judicial reports; the French Gazettes des Tribuneaux; the Italian, Spanish, and… 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?