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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 Narrow Escape.

by Judge Clark

“Pshaw!” “Bosh!” “Nonsense!”

With these, and such like exclamations, was greeted my suggestion that, after all, Arthur Graves might be an innocent man—at any rate, that there was still an unsolved mystery in the case.

“Mystery!” sneered Felix Craft, a cheeky young lawyer, who had won my profound dislike at first sight and steadily grown in it ever since; “there never was a clearer case. Wasn’t George Singleton’s dead body found in Graves’s room, the breast pierced by two pistol-shots, and the weapon, proved to be the property of Graves, lying near, containing two exploded cartridges? Didn’t the ball found in the body exactly fit the pistol, and wasn’t Graves seen hurrying from the house, pale and agitated, the moment before I chanced to enter his room and discovered the evidence of the terrible deed? Why, my own testimony is enough to hang the villain!”

“It may have been suicide,” I ventured to hint.

Another chorus of “pshaws!” and “boshes!” assailed this suggestion.

“Then why does Graves keep in hiding, as he has done ever since? Innocent men aren’t apt to skulk in that fashion,” was the crushing finisher Felix Craft gave my last surmise.

Not caring to continue a contest in which I was far from feeling I had the strong side, I retreated… 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?