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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

A Mysterious Lodger

Though we could hardly hope to meet with a model lodger again, like the Rev. Mr. Adolphus, who had been with us ever since we began housekeeping, it was certainly desirable—so Annie and I concluded—to have a lodger of some kind, even if it were an inferior description of the article; for my salary at that time, as junior clerk in the respectable banking firm of Lawes & Fielding, was more prospective than real; sufficient, perhaps, for a bachelor of economic tastes, but sadly out of proportion with the needs of a married man.

It being decided, therefore, that a second lodger was a necessary evil, a card notifying that apartments for a single gentleman were to be let within took its place in our window; but week after week passed away, winter faded into spring, spring lost itself in summer, and still we remained without a single applicant for our very genteel and commodious rooms.

The hot days of June were drawing to a close when, on reaching home one evening from the office, I saw by the sparkle in my wife’s eye that she had something particular to tell me, and I was scarcely seated before the news burst out.

“Tom, dear, we have got a lodger at last!”

“Did you say a lodger?” I cried, starting up. “Another poor victim come to the net—to be… 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?