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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 Wronged Wife

This story, to which I have given the above title, is among the most singular instances of mistaken circumstantial evidence during later years, and is still remembered in France, where it occurred as the Despenard affair.

Monsieur Despenard was a retired speculator on the Bourse. He was reputed to be very wealthy, and occupied a charming suburban villa on the banks of the Seine. His family consisted of himself, his wife and two children, a boy and a girl, aged respectively five and seven years.

One night about nine o’clock, in the summer of 1864, the servants were startled by the report of a pistol, accompanied by a sound of breaking glass ringing through the house. After a few moments of hesitation, lest it should be burglars, they rushed in a body to the library, from which the sound had seemed to proceed, and found their master fallen face downward upon the floor, with the blood pouring profusely from a wound in the temple.

A hasty and horrified examination showed that he was dead, the bullet having penetrated his brain, while the shattered glass of one of the large windows also proved that the assassin, whoever it might have been, had stood on the veranda outside and taken aim at the victim through the window.

Fully ten minutes must have elapsed before the slow wits of the servants arrived at this conclusion, and they began to wonder that Madame Despenard had not also been aroused by the noise. Could it be possible, they asked themselves, that she also had fallen a victim? And with this fear in their minds, they proceeded to her boudoir and knocked on the door.

No answer being returned, they opened the door, which was unlocked, and entered the room, only to find it empty; and they were looking at each other still more surprised than before, when one of them, more self-possessed than the rest, suggested that the police be sent for.… 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?