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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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The Detective’s Story

My name is – no matter. I am called Tony. I have never been a member of the regular police, and I hope my vanity will be pardoned when I say that I consider my occupation a grade or two above it; since it must be evident to every one that a dull person may be and often is a serviceable policeman, while a detective has no chance of success without a ready perception and a close study of human nature. I am intuitively possessed of a faculty of imitation, which I have cultivated to be of great service in my business, as it enables me to assume, in a very deceptive manner, the disguise of any character I please; indeed, so many different parts have I played, and in such various company have I mixed, that it seems to me a serious problem, at times, where my proper position in society lays.

I have a partner in business whose real name I have no right to make public. He is a coarse-featured person, and is capable of converting himself by means of dress into one of the most rough-looking and repulsive of men. While in one of the meanest of his disguises, some one gave him the name of “Slouch:” and this rather repulsive sobriquet attached to him at first in the spirit of pleasantry, is now about the only name by which I address him. He is a good hearted fellow; muscular and courageous, and he has, in more than one instance, saved me from great peril, if not actually my life. Slouch has a remarkable faculty of reading crime in the face. His conclusions are generally correct; yet how he arrives at them has always been a mystery to me. My own suspicions are the result of some theory, and I will freely confess that my… 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?