The News

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

Mistaken Identity

One evening while in the billiard room of a Dieppe hotel, a young man invited me to join him. I consented, and we played for an hour or so, after which we went up to his room, smoked and played piquet.— He remarked while playing that we looked so much alike we might be taken for brothers. I had not especially remarked the likeness between us till now, but it was not very great. The similitude merely consisted in both of us wearing a rather long red beard, and hair the same color; but, then, his eyes were blue, mine gray, and he had a scar over his left eye. Still, one of us might have been taken for the other at a distance.

We played till midnight, and I left him, going to my room; but an indescribable feeling came over me, and I could not sleep. I tossed about in my bed, then got up, lit a cigar, and sat at my window, looking down on the “Quai Henri Quatre,” smoking.

It had just struck two from the church of St. Jacques, when I saw a carriage drive up to the door, and three men got out and entered the hotel. I wondered where they could have come from in a carriage at that time of night. I sat smoking and thinking, when a light tap came to my door; I unlocked it; it was my friend with whom I had been playing billiards. He had a valise in his hand, and appeared in a hurry, but not the least excited.

“They have just sent a carriage for me; my father is not expected to live till morning; take care of this for me until to-morrow,” he said, leaving the valise in my room.

All this passed so quickly I had not time to think, and he passed down stairs, and I did not dream of following him, being undressed, I went back to the window and saw the carriage drive off rapidly. Then I said to myself, “Why did he not take the valise with him, and as he had a carriage?” but then, I thought he had needs to travel quickly, and did not… 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?