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

The Wife’s Secret

by Howard Hazeltine

If I pride myself upon any mental endowment whatever, it is upon that humble one of common sense. I live what is called by the intellectual people a conventional life. I have my pew in the neighboring church, and sit in it twice every Sunday. I know one captain in the army- just such a person as he should be-polished, and yet ferocious, gentle to ladies, but rather insolent to civilian males, boastful of his clubs, and giving all his leisure time, which is considerable, to the cultivation if his mustaches; but otherwise I am ignorant of the fashionable world and all its gay doings. I have made no endeavor to break through the gilded pale that separates it from the steady-going middle class to which I belong. I do not understand the feeling which prompts my superiors to be ashamed of being seen in an omnibus. Once every day I return from the city in a yellow one; and if it is wet, I use the same conveyance in the morning to reach my office. I pay tradesmen weekly. My best sherry is 48s a dozen; and when the captain talks vintage wines (as he will do by the hour at my table), I often wonder what he thinks he is drinking. However, with true good-breeding, he imbibes it in great quantities, as though it were the best. I do not keep a man-servant. Our cook cannot compass an omelette souflee. My wife trims her own bonnets. We have eight children, who all know the church catechism by heart, except the baby and the last but one. In short, a family more respectable and unfashionable than our own does not exist in all Bayswater.

Under these circumstances, it may be easily imagined that we are as free from the view of the great as we are without their privileges; and this was, I honestly believe, the case until within a very recent period. When I used to read in the papers that Lady Luctetia Day Coltay (of Norman ancestry and bluest blood) had left her… 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?