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

Broke Jail

by D. H. Johnson

The directors of the Dan and Beersheba Railway Company, you remember, treated themselves and their friends, last summer, to an excursion over so much of their road as was then in running order. Of course a good many newspaper men were taken along as historiographers of the trip. When I remember all the able and fervent articles, celebrating the present and prospective glories of the Dan and Beersheba Railway and its imperial land-grant, that were inspired by that free ride, I cannot but think that the excursion, great success as it was in all respects, was greatest in the way of inexpensive advertising. You remember that the more enterprising excursionists, including, of course, the newspaper men, took a construction train and went far beyond the then stopping-place for passenger-cars, to witness the operations of a new steam track-laying machine.

The machine was superintended by the patentee, a stout gentleman of about forty-five, dressed in a cool business suit of pearl gray. His clean-shaved face was somewhat brown and knobby, and was an unmistakably Hibernian face of the good-humored variety. Its most noticeable peculiarity was that the lips seemed to be pushed a little forward by the front teeth.

I stood near him as he politely and with rare perspicuity explained the principles and modus operandi of the machine. His eyes rested upon me and mine upon him as he talked. Mutual recognition dawned and grew brighter in our minds and eyes, until he abruptly closed his explanation and walked away. As he went, he cast back at me… 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?