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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 Countess

by Alexis Puffer

I blushed just then as I wrote that word. I glanced furtively over my desk towards that one dear woman whom it was my privileged happiness to feed and clothe, and turned abashed from the reproachful spectacle of the little stockings and shoes upon the hearth. Heed me not, wife! Spin and weave. O thou pensive Arachne, while I still unravel this tangled web of my past life and count its lost and useless stitches. Sleep on. O Adolphus, my latest born, nor move restlessly in thy slumbers. Better the pangs of colic than the stings of remorse. Haply mayst though never know the day when Godfrey’s cordial shall no longer bring balm to thy spirit and paregoric cease to sooth thy repose.

It was twenty years ago this night. I was returning from boarding school. I was sixteen and shy. I had that usual tendency of young bipeds to run to legs and neck and bill. My form was gotten up with distinct reference to my retiring disposition—so economic were its principles that I slipped almost noiselessly through the crowded cars of the H. R. R. Road and slid into a seat beside a portly man with whiskers. There was a lady in the seat opposite me. There is one in this story. They are identical.

I… 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?