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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

Select Story

Among the “Sharks”

Adventures of a Fall River Wanderer—

His Valuable Experience in New York—

The Bond Operator

by George McWatters

A part of Officer McWatters’ duty, when connected with the Railroad and Steamboat Squad, was to advise and protect strangers in the city. He, of course, encountered many a curious country chap, making his debut in the great Metropolis. One of the most comical, if not the most valuable things Officer McWatters could possibly do for the delectation of readers in general, would be to write out his multifold experiences with strangers in the city, and put the whole into book form, entitled, for example, “Afloat in the Sea of Iniquity, Waifs Gathered There.” The following is taken from the New York Mercury of some years ago.

Officer McWatters, whose urbanity and politeness is proverbial, was accosted yesterday forenoon, by a young man who had just stepped off of the Fall River boat, who inquired of him to know the way to the Park.

“What park?” politely queried the officer.

“O, I don’t know,—any park where I can sit down a while, and see something of New York!”

“Better take a stage and go to Union Park. Everything clean, quiet, and orderly.”

The officer assisted the young man into the stage, which soon sat him down in Union Park. The Park never looked lovelier. Children and drums, nurses and baby-wagons, small boys and fire-crackers, lovely maidens with books of poesy, the water-basin and the flowing fountain, the green trees and the luxuriant shade, all were but parts of a perfect whole, which Mr. Jasper Gray, the young man in question, enjoyed hugely.

Mr. Gray is a native of that enterprising village known as Fall River, and he had come to New York to see the sights. The senior Gray had warned him to look out for the “… 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?