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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

A Queer Clue

in two chapters

chapter i.

As an ex-detective, I am often asked to relate my adventures, and at one time I was ready enough to do so; but I soon found that my tales were looked upon as dull, prosy things, and not at all like what detectives ought to have to say for themselves. Everybody seemed to think that detectives ought to find things out by a sort of magical divination; but I was reckoned a pretty good one, and I have known some of our greatest celebrities; and the only way any of us ever found anything out was by inquiring of everybody who was likely to know a little, keeping our eyes on any probable party, holding our tongues, and putting the scraps together. Now and then we were befriended by a lucky chance; and when this happens we get a hundred times more praise than when we puzzle out the darkest and toughest case. The last affair I was ever engaged in was of this kind. I was first concerned in it two years before I left the Police, after, by-the-bye, I had quite given up the detective branch; and I resumed it three years afterward, that is the three years after I had left the Police; and this is how it occurred. I must first say, however, that I don’t at all regard this as one of the dull, prosy cases referred to; in fact, it was the most exciting business I was ever engaged in.

I had left the detective work, as I said, and indeed had left London, for when I grew a little tired of the business I was recommended to the authorities at Combestead, a thriving market-town in one of the home counties; I had a very comfortable situation there, having little to do, very good pay, and being head of the borough Police. Of course there is a great… 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?