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

The Last of the Gang

by Paul Blume

The wind blew a perfect tempest carrying with it heavy drifts of snow that rendered it very difficult for pedestrians to pursue their way along the streets. As one blast, more fierce than the others, shook the house to its very foundation, Luke Brainard walked to the window and gazed out on the night.

‘Twas only a few moments he looked on the storm, and with a weary sigh he drew the curtain closely together and sat down at his writing-table, with his eyes fixed upon the glowing fire that roared in the grate.

Luke Brainard was a man of fashion, a gentleman, dandy, if you will. His age was about four-and-fifty, but he was so well preserved that he was generally taken to be much younger than he really was. His glossy brown hair and beard were without a single streak of gray, and no crows’ feet marked his handsome florid face. He was habited in an elegant cashmere dressing-gown, and his faultless white shirt was thrown open at the throat, displaying a neck, short and bull-like, but white as a dainty belle’s. His small hands were adorned by a single diamond, and his feet were encased in yellow Turkish slippers.

Luke Brainard was counted handsome even by men, and no one was more popular among his fellows. His exquisite taste made him a leading authority at his club, and many a dandy would have considered himself blessed for even one of Brainard’s familiar nods in public.

No one could form a conjecture of his worldly possessions. He was always moderately supplied with money, and played so cautiously that his losses were never very serious.

His most intimate-associates, had they seen him upon the evening we have introduced him to the reader, would have supposed he was a ruined man.

As he sat looking into the fire, there came a quick pull at the… 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?