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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 Lawyer’s Story

[Philadelphia Times]

“I never would convict a man on circumstantial evidence if I were a juror—never! never!”

The speaker was a distinguished criminal lawyer of nearly forty years’ active practice and whose fame extended far beyond the limits of his own State.

We had been discussing a recent cause celebre in which, upon purely circumstantial evidence, a man had been convicted of an atrocious murder, although many of those most familiar with the circumstances of the case entertained the gravest doubts about the justice of his conviction, and had been swung off into eternity, protesting his absolute innocence with his latest breath and calling upon God to send his soul straightway to hell if he was not telling the truth.

As most of our party were lawyers the conversation, naturally enough, drifted into a discussion of the dangers arising from convicting accused persons whose own mouths were closed upon purely circumstantial evidence in the absence of any direct and positive proof of guilt, and case after case was cited in which, after conviction and execution, the entire innocence of the supposed culprits had been clearly demonstrated. Most of the laymen present agreed with the distinguished lawyer whose very positive expression of opinion had been quoted, while the majority of the lawyers contented, with that earnestness for which lawyers are noted when advocating their own side of any question, that justice could never miscarry when careful judges guard against the possibility of unsafe verdicts by refusing to permit a conviction except when every link in the chain of circumstantial evidence had been established beyond doubt and the whole chain been made so perfect and complete as to leave no room for any consistent hypothesis of innocence.

“The first murder case I tried,” said one of them, “was stranger than fiction, as… 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?