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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 Mysterious Murder

by James Maitland

Chicago has always been notorious for its criminals. Other cities can boast of desperate thieves, thugs and murderers, but for ingenious rascality and blood-curdling scoundrelism, the outlaws of the Garden City carry off the palm. No satisfactory explanation of our excessive criminality has ever been given, and it is not my purpose to attempt one. It may be that the lax administration of justice in the city encourages the thief and midnight assassin; it may be that our citizens have learned to look upon preeminence in vice and wickedness as an additional feather in the cap of the Northwestern metropolis; it may be that our unchecked gambling dens and our unbridled saloons have had the effect of making our criminals more reckless and daring than the same class in other cities. Whatever the cause, such is the fact.

But it is not alone in the lower and brutal grades of crime that Chicago stands preeminent. A certain looseness of morals exists which has no parallel in any other city in the world. The divorce courts are blocked with business, and the deadly canker of domestic infelicity is daily destroying thousands of homes which should be temples of love and joy and peace.

Strange and horrible crimes often spring from this domestic discord. This leaf will reveal one of many features of horror and painful sadness. It will show to what extent misguided passion will lead its victims—to what extreme a deceived woman will go for revenge.

In the spring of 1873 the community was shocked by the murder of a prominent citizen in one of the best known and most splendidly appointed of our hotels. A number of mysterious circumstances surrounded the case. The man—a large and prosperous merchant—had visited the hotel alone early in the evening, and registering “Jas. Russell, Cleveland, Ohio,” engaged a room for the night. He… 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?