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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 Mystery Solved

The more I studied over it, the more it puzzled me. It was a brief document, covering but one side of a leaf of paper, and the signature, beyond question, was John Merivale’s crabbed sign manual, leaving everything to his “beloved third cousin, Bozrah Beggs.”

The affection which inspired such an act must have been of sudden growth, for two more uncongenial spirits than John Merivale and Bozrah Beggs could hardly be imagined.

John Merivale had taken to his home and heart the orphan child of an old friend. So young was little Katie at the time, that she never remembered any other father, and a kind, loving father she had found in old John Merivale; and how proud of her he was when she grew up a beauty, with scores of suitors at her feet, the number not diminished by the open secret of Mr. Merivale’s intent to make her the heiress of his fortune.

When the news came of one of those terrible railroad accidents which periodically cast a gloom over the land, and John Merivale’s name appeared in the list of the killed, it was a great shock to the community in which he had long dwelt in honor and esteem; and not less was… 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?