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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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“A Flat”

A Story of College Life

Arthur Hoyt looked at himself in the glass curiously, and without self-love or self-prejudice. He saw there a frank, good-natured face, a pair of blue eyes and a mass of curly brown hair. As far as he could judge there was nothing particularly out of the way with his countenance.

“Say, Dick,” he began, to his roommate, who was puzzling over a page of Xenophon, “I’ve been taking account of stock, and I don’t see anything unpardonably wrong about my features. They are not angular enough to be called sharp, nor level enough to be justly called flat; so I can’t exactly see the suitableness of the expression which has somehow come to be my college cognomen.”

“Don’t be a fool,” growled Dick, without looking up from his book.

“I’ve always been a great stickler for the fitness of things, eternal and temporal,” continued Arthur, “and if to be ‘a flat’ is really applicable as a correct description of the impression my personal appearance makes on my companions, all right! I’d as soon respond to that name as any other; but if it’s not mine, then, old fellow, it’s got to be stopped!”

“If you’d rob hen-roosts, and steal the housekeeper’s preserves, and lay [traps] to trip up old men and women, and raise Cain generally, you’d be the most popular fellow in college,” said Dick, with a disdainful grimace, still with his eyes fixed on his book. “They let me alone, you see, because I don’t care a hang for ‘em, and because they know I’m as poor as poverty… 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?