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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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La Belle Tambourine

by William Russell

The authorities being extremely anxious that Durand should be recaptured, were good enough to appoint me one of the agents for hunting him down. Two veteran gendarmes, Marin and Cremieux, whose coolness and resolution had been often proved, were associated with me. As I knew Durand personally, and was thought to have more head than my two selected comrades, the direction of the hunt was confided to me, which, after all, was but my right. How, like true sleuth-hounds, we tracked Durand, and the final issue of the exciting chase, will be given in a subsequent paper. At present, I have only to say that the trail, a false one, had led us, by the 28th of September, to Angers, chef-lieu and assize town of the department of the Maine and Loire. The town was full, and great excitement prevailed; the cause of which we found to be that the ordinary attractions of St. Michael’s Fair, to be held on the morrow, would be greatly enhanced by the exciting spectacle of the guillotine in action, a great moral lesson, which authority had decided could not, upon this occasion, have too large an audience.

I and my comrades listened with interest to the slightly varying versions of the crime, with its attendant circumstances, for which the doomed felon was to suffer, and, as we had for the moment lost scent of Durand, we might, without neglect of our own proper duty, share in whatever benefit might be derived from the great moral lesson.

* * * * * *

An immense mass of people is gathered round the scaffold, and amongst that eager surging crowd the name of Jean Gosset Laboudie is bandied about in every variety of emphasis and tone, expressive of scorn, indignation, loathing, abhorrence. Presently, he appears in the cart, with a priest by… 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?