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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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Trailing a Thief

A Detective's Long Chase After a Fugitive Cashier

From Minnesota Through Canada, England, France, Spain and Italy to Switzerland — A Clever Ruse to Avoid Extradition Proceedings

While a murder is now and then committed without the murderer being brought to justice, and while a proportion of burglars, robbers and embezzlers are bound to escape arrest, from the nature of things, an experience of twenty years in criminal work has satisfied me that no criminal can escape justice if a clue be left to work on, if that clue is persistently followed.

In March, 1865, a man named Vinewood, of Vermont, with another named Adams, of Cincinnati, established a bank in a new town in Minnesota. The former was a bachelor fifty years old, and the latter a young man of twenty-three. Just how they became acquainted I have forgotten, but I believe they first met in a bank in Cincinnati in which Adams was employed as book-keeper. He had $10,000 in cash which a relative had left him, and Vinewood put in $40,000, and a bank with a capital of $50,000 was established. After about a month, when every thing was running smoothly, Vinewood returned to Vermont on business, having the most perfect faith that all would go well in his absence. On the very day he left Adams received deposits from citizens and from the county treasurer aggregating $18,000. The trustees of an institution likewise placed in his vault for safe keeping $20,000 worth of United States bonds.

Up to this date the bank had loaned out about $3,000, and it had $10,000 on deposit in Milwaukee and Chicago. Vinewood left in the morning. That same evening at… 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?