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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 Sister’s Vengeance

It was between the lights on a gloomy December afternoon. I was the sole occupant of the smoking-room of a “Literary and Artistic Club” which faces the Thames. I flung fresh coal on the gloomy embers, and stirred them till they sent up a blaze of light that drove the ghosts out of the shadowy corners, and then picked up a paper haphazard from the table, to dawdle over it till the waiter lighted the gas or some human being wandered in to keep me company. It was an American paper. Some visitor to the club had left it behind him, accidentally. I turned the pages listlessly, until suddenly my attention was arrested by a paragraph headed “Extraordinary Crime.” It was the story of the robbery of a body of a lady from its grave. The whole affair was shrouded in mystery. On the 14th of the month there died in an American city the beautiful wife of an Englishman traveling for pleasure. In the same paper which contained this paragraph I found under the heading of “Cradle, Altar, Tomb,” the following: “On the 14th inst… 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?