The News

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

Select Story

A Detective's Story

An officer in a reminiscent mood writes to the Cincinnati Enquirer the following: You are aware that people who indulge their appetites to excess for strong drink, and who garner the excitement of the gaming-table, are apt to form unreasonable and highly erroneous impressions even regarding their best friends. It happened that my young hero, whose name was John O’Brown, obtained the idea that I had something to do with his adoption of the life of a gambler. He imagined that his family had disowned him therefore and that his intended wife had married another man because of his dissolute habits. One evening as I was sitting in my room congratulating myself upon having lived a useful and ornamental life, and planning how I could perform several acts of benevolence without being detected, the door suddenly flew open with a crash in obedience to the mandate of an enthusiastic and industrious foot, and, to my consternation, there stood before me, attired in blood-shot eyes, nobody but John O’Brown. He held a double-action revolver of uncomfortable caliber in one hand and a Chinese laundry ticket in the other.

“‘I have come to kill you!’ he exclaimed, as he stood in front of me rocking to and fro from the effects of a debauch that must have lasted about eight days. As he swayed to and fro like a cobra de capello preparing to strike, his eyes leered at me in a most suggestive way, and I saw that I must act quickly or not at all.

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?