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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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Leaf the Twenty-Third

Buried Alive

by John Williams

(The stories which follow and conclude this series are not details of my own experience, nor are they strictly of a detective character. They are the adventures of various personal friends of mine, and I am certain they are for the most part strictly true. In two or three of them perhaps, the relators may have allowed imagination to supply the place of facts. I have thought them sufficiently interesting to deserve a place in this collection. J. B.)

“Come, Grafton, it is your turn to tell us an adventure.”

“Oh, nothing has happened to me since I was buried alive!”

“What!” we all cried, in accents of the greatest astonishment.

There were half a dozen of us young fellows on a visit to George Grafton who was doing a first-rate practice in a small town in the State of Maryland. He had insisted on us visiting him for “Auld Lang Syne,” and this was the second evening we had passed at his house. The simple fact is, George was to be married in a day or two and we were there to assist at the ceremony, as the French say. George Grafton was as good a fellow as ever breathed; and we, his fellow-students, loved him with all our hearts.

“I repeat,” said George, “that nothing has happened to me since I was buried alive.”

“Oh, you’re joking,” said one of us.

“Why, I must have told that story over and over again,” returned George.

“We never heard it,” we all cried.

“Is it possible? well boys, light a fresh cigar, fill up your glasses, and I will tell you all about it.”

We all followed the advice given us by our friend, and fixed ourselves into listening attitudes.

“Eight years ago,” began Grafton, “I was studying my profession in the University Medical College of New York. I… 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?