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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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Kind Chance

A Detective Story

If you doubt there are any smart fellows among the New York detectives, just entrust them with some refreshingly mysterious case of robbery or other misdoing, and then follow the thread of their scheming to find the true parties concerned.

Much impressed by the able way, a young officer worked up a burglary at our place, and finding him intelligent and companionable, I kept up the acquaintance, and enjoyed many a bright chat when I happened to come across him.

I fell in with him one cool, pleasant evening, when the rush had died out of Broadway. As we sauntered up the great thoroughfare, a group of elderly, substantial men passed us and I saw a smile on my young friend Javert’s face. Not having observed anything particular in the men, I inquired what amused him.

He made the inquiry:

“Are you acquainted with the heavy parent in the white tie?”

I assured him I had not observed him at all. Whereupon he continued:

“I had a visit from him, and the occasion of it makes quite a neat little story.”

“Let me hear it by all means; your stories, Mons. Javert, are never without point.”

“Oh, it isn’t much, and yet it illustrates what all good detectives know—that stolen money found in one’s pocket does not always prove one a thief. You must know the white necktie is a deacon of an uptown church. I may as well call him Deacon Choker, if you want the story. As becomes a deacon, he had never had any very close dealings with wicked folks, and therefore was in a considerably shocked and perturbed state when he came to the office and told me he had been the victim of a series of small robberies, amounting to over a hundred dollars, practiced upon him, he had every reason to believe, by a servant woman named Huldah Stearns.

“He lived, it appeared, in a sober, stylish uptown boarding house, his only relative,… 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?