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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

The Story of a Thumb-Mark

Remarkable Detection of a Murder

“You’ll be very sorry for this, uncle.” I.

The speaker was a young man—little more than a lad, indeed, to judge by his smooth face, though in figure he was stalwart and well set up. He spoke passionately as he closed the door and came out. He did not go back to his desk in the counting house, but passed straight from his uncle’s private office to the street, snatching his hat from the wall in the passage as he left.

“Another row with the governor. Mark my words,” said one of the clerks to his neighbor, “that young fellow will come to no good.”

The “governor” thus referred to was sole representative of the firm of Anthony Greig & Co., situated in one of the large seaport towns in the west of England. Nearly a hundred men and women were employed in the factory, and the firm’s trade mark, a ship in full sail, was known all the world over on their packages of flour, meal, and biscuits. Greig’s biscuits were sucked by babies everywhere—from England to the antipodes, from Shanghai to San Francisco; ladies crumbled Greig’s… 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?