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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

The Magic Glass

or

Detecting a Murderer

by M. Quad

There had been a murder down at Colville—a cold-blooded murder the dispatch said—and I was detailed to go down and work up the case.

It was my trade—or profession then—hunting down thieves and murderers, and I had been so long at the business that a telegram announcing a murder was taken as coolly as if the despatch had related to some ordinary happening.

Before noon I was at Colville. It was a little hamlet about twenty miles from New York, and three miles off the railroad. I had answered the despatch before leaving New York, and they were therefore expecting me. As I landed on the platform a farmer came up and inquired my name, and I was requested to take a seat in his one-horse wagon for a drive to the village. He was greatly excited over the murder, and we had only got started when he commenced talking.

I soon learned that it was a woman who had been murdered—a rich old spinster named Miss Williams. She was a woman about fifty-five years old, living in the best house in the village, and being possessed of quite a large fortune. She had never been married, but years before had adopted a boy who was now a young man of twenty. These two, with a couple of servants, made up the family.

“It was an awful thing!” said the farmer, as he saw that I was interested. “It is supposed that she was murdered about midnight, though it might have been an hour later. At least, when they found her, soon after daylight, she was cold and stiff.”

“And how was it done?”

“O, that’s plain to be seen,” he replied; “she slept alone in a bedroom on the first floor, and the murderer went in and beat her over the head with an iron bolt—the king-bolt of a wagon. Her skull is crushed in, and her face is a horrible sight. We left the body just as we found it, 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?