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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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A Texas Tragedy

by An Old Contributor

In the height of the land fever, my friend, Harvey Knight, and I went on a southwestern trip to try our fortune with the rest. Who knew but we might stumble on the site of some future great metropolis, where a few hundreds judiciously invested might make us millionaires by the time we reached our prime? Such things had happened to others; why not to us?

As a general thing we pursued our way in company, but occasionally we would separate for a day or two, agreeing on a place of rendezvous, at which whoever arrived first would wait for the other. Our explorations were thus given a wider scope, at less expense of time than would have been possible had we remained constantly together.

We had hardly crossed the Texas boundary when we began to hear of Reuben Duckwall. Like other travellers through the sparsely settled region, we found it prudent to keep ourselves informed, from time to time, of the various places ahead at which food and shelter might be found.

To the answers to our inquiries one piece of advice was invariably added:

“Stop at Duckwall’s tavern, w’atever time ye git there. Old Reub’s the chap to do the squar’ thing by man an’ beast, an’ besides he’s a man of eddycation.”

“Come,” said Harvey Knight, as we took the saddle one morning, “you push… 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?