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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

Select Story

A Mistake That Turned Out No Mistake

by Judge Clark

My name is Smith—John Smith, to be more precise—and thereby hangs a tale.

I had barely reached the age at which the law, subject only to its own requirements, gave me the right to do as I pleased, when business of no consequence to the reader called me to Hinnomsdale, a remote country village, ten miles from the nearest railroad, and twice as far from anywhere else.

I was walking the platform waiting for the train when my attention was attracted by the arrival of a carryall literally covered with trunks and drawn by a span of nervous-looking horses driven by a gawky youth evidently as new as themselves to the situation.

Just then a whistle sounded, whereat the horses took fright, and, in spite of the ill-directed efforts of their incompetent driver, dashed off in a direction which, in another instant, would have brought them and the vehicle in front of a rapidly approaching train. I sprang to their heads, and knowing it would be impossible at once to arrest their progress, put forth all my strength to change their course, and succeeded in doing so barely in time to escape being crushed by the ponderous engine, whose iron framework brushed my garments as it thundered by.

It was now that I first saw that the inmates of the carriage were a couple of ladies—one of them very young and very beautiful, the other not so very.

I was gracefully and gratefully thanked by both; but the look I received from the younger made me half regret that I had come off without receiving at least a scratch for her sake. She was pale, and her voice trembled a little, but she exhibited no other token of being conscious of having passed through great… 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?