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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 Piquant Anecdote

Don Louis Eguilar, the Madrid correspondent of a Havana paper, relates in one of his late letters the following curious episode. A Spanish lady of high rank, being recently invited to dine with an Austrian princess in Paris, was found in her dressing-room, busily engaged in putting on the proper vestments for the occasion. When she came to the point of adorning herself with a certain set of pearls and emeralds that she prized very highly, there was found wanting the breast-pin. Suspecting a robbery, she examined closely her jewel-box, and was fully confirmed in her suspicions. As it happens that a lady of good breeding, though fretted and annoyed, knows how to conceal, more or less, her vexation, she said nothing of her loss, but the princess and guests perceived, by the working of the lady’s face and the uneasy air which she maintained, that something extraordinary was passing through her mind. To ask her what had happened, and to receive a reply, couched in injured tones, and accusing all the French of being thieves and robbers, was but the work of a moment; and the ladies, because of her saying so many and such hard things, were induced to report her conduct to the emperor, their master. The question seemed to be one of national honor. A few minutes thereafter, the shrewdest detectives in Paris were at work, examining all the jewelry stores, with the hope of finding the lost pin. They did find it. A celebrated dealer in diamonds, a Spaniard, by the by, had bought it for the sum of $32,000, and had already sold it to an English lord for $35,000, in whose possession the piece of jewelry was found.

“How did you happen to buy this piece of jewelry that you ought to have known was stolen?” asked the agent of the police… 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?