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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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Leaves from the Note-Book of a New-York Detective

Introduction

by the Editor

Some years ago I was traveling in the South. By some misadventure I missed the train at Augusta, Georgia, and was compelled to spend a night in that rather slow town. I patronized the best hotel in the place, and after having partaken of an early supper I thought I would go and explore the city until bed-time.

Half an hour, however, was amply sufficient to see all the lions of the place, and at the end of that time I returned to my hotel, wearied and ennuied.

I listlessly entered the reading room which was also the bar-room; and taking up a paper that had been issued in New York four days previously, composed myself to read the shipping intelligence. Not that I had the remotest interest in that species of news, but it was the only part of the paper I had not perused.

While thus engaged, a slight cough drew my attention from the arrivals and departures and raised my eyes. Seated at the further end of the from was an individual I had not noticed before. He was a man, I suppose, between forty and forty-five years of age. There was something very peculiar in his features which immediately arrested my attention, I do not know how to describe it, but it gave me the idea that he possessed in an eminent degree the power of analysis. This impression was further increased by his movements. They were quick; and it was plainly to be perceived that he did not allow the slightest circumstance to escape him. I am not naturally inclined to make friends with strangers, but there was something in the man which attracted me to him. I drew my chair… 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?