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 Experience

Treachery

It was a dark, rainy day. The dawn had stolen in through ashen clouds and a dense fog wrapped around the houses and lay upon the streets like a winding sheet. A misty wind, steely and cold, now and then, would whistle along the wide avenue and rattle the shutterless casements of the old brick house. A wild, blustering day was that Tuesday, twenty years ago; and many a heart shrank with a strange feeling of horror as they read in the morning Picayune of the tragedy far down on Chartes street. It was one of those densely crowded districts for which certain localities in New Orleans were then noted.

“Mr. I—— and myself,” said Mr. F——, “had been sent for at an early hour, and were among the first to reach the place, where a young girl, in the very flush and beauty of her tender womanhood, lay murdered. On a low cot, the crimson stain on sheet and pillow, and the dark hair thrown back like floss of silk, the dead girl lay. Underneath the linen sheet was traced the outline of the slender limbs and rounded form. Full of grace and exquisitely fashioned had the beautiful creature been in life. Even with the seal of death stamped upon face and… 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?