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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

Written for The Flag of Our Union

The Haunted Church

An Old Sexton's Story

by Arthur L. Meserve

Such a commotion as there was in town when it came to be fully believed that our church was haunted I never saw in my life before, and hope and trust I never may again. It was all that was talked about, from one end of the community to the other, until at last not a child dared to go to bed alone in the dark, and many a grown person was in the same predicament. The church you know is surrounded on three sides by a large number of evergreens, so that even in the broad daylight it is gloomy and solemn in and around it; and since it had got about that it was haunted few there were that cared to pass it after dark; and even in the daytime people took pains to cross to the opposite side of the street so that they might be as far from the ghosts as possible.

As you can see, it is but a little way from my cottage here to the church; yet even the walls can only be seen in one spot, and about half of one of the windows, owing to the evergreens of which I have spoken, growing so close about it, and there, perhaps, it was little wonder that I saw nothing of the ghosts (there were more than one, people said,) until it was noised all about the town that strange sights and sounds had been seen and heard coming from within at late hours in the night or very early in the morning.

The first word that I heard about the ghosts came from my wife. A relative had died in a distant town, and I had been summoned there, and found it impossible to return for a week. My wife… 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?