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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 Story of Felice

“Mrs. Montressor has eloped with her husband’s most valued friend.”

So ran the tale from lip to lip in the small town of Burnley, not very far from the great metropolis.

It was quite true! A hard truth to the deserted husband, cowering from sight in his library—a palpable truth to the circle of fashionable gossips who had foreseen this coming end for some months. The wife had left her husband and her home—worse, if possible, she had left her child—Heaven be thanked, they had but one!—had left this child, a girl of four years old, to the mercy of what?—of the world, that small world centered in Burnley, to be alternately pitied, sneered at and shunned, for the sake of its mother, and its mother’s crime.

Sometimes, when he had calmer moods, the child, Felice, would be carried to his cell to look at him, to see if he would recognize her. But it was hazardous; for the child bore a cruelly beautiful resemblance to the mother, and the sight of her made him fancy she had returned, and was praying for his love, which maddened him more than ever. So at last this faint glimpse of his former joys was denied to him, the child rarely came, and the father pined away in miserable alternations of speechless despondency and raving delirium.

And the mother? Let us give a sketch of this woman’s life. She had been a child of poor parents, who apprenticed her to a fashionable milliner in the city. She was cursed, this girl, who was exceedingly frivolous, cursed with a beautiful face, and a most charming figure. She was only sixteen when she was thus flung into temptation of the sorest; for poverty was at her heels, following her like a devil, forever prompting her… 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?