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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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From “A Visit to My Discontented Cousin,” to be published by Robert Bros.

The Cipher Correspondence

The story I am about to tell relates to an incident in the history of England which is but little known, and which you will not find in books, but one which, nevertheless, had a great effect on her destinies.

About the beginning of this century, while the revolutionary wars were raging, communication in cipher was naturally very prevalent; and ingenuity was taxed to the utmost, one hand to invent, and on the other to detect, the medium used in secret correspondence. As a rule the decipherer had beaten the cipherer; and no known method was secure of detection. If conventional signs merely were used, the recurrence of the different symbols gave a key easily followed out. Some ingenious spirits corresponded by reference to the pages and lines of particular editions of particular books; others by an agreed-on vocabulary. But these last methods, although they might preserve the secret, disclosed, what was often quite as dangerous, that there was a secret. I am about to tell you of a plan which for long years was not only undetected, but unsuspected.… 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?