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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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Number Thirty-Nine

The faint light of an early Summer dawn, more than a score of years ago, was just beginning to change the shadowy blackness of house and tree into gray outlines of even more weird and ghostly shape, as the door of a house in Frith street, New York, was softly opened from within, and a woman glided forth like a spirit, and, swiftly passing out, was almost in an instant lost to sight. If any lonely watcher at any window had seen her form, his recollection of it would have faded away as a dream fades before the light of a cloudless sunrise.

Slowly the gray sky melted into a paler gray; slowly the gray sky softened into pearly tints that in the far-off horizon were tinged with gold; slowly the golden halo stole all over the firmament, vanished into unfathomable depths of blue; and the great round sun, rising, flashed his beams from roof and steeple, then on inland stream and gay flowers, and it was day. The great city awoke. The footfall in the street ceased to echo, the distant tap of the patrol was heard no more. The rattle of cart and rail-car began to shake… 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?