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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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Written for The Flag of Our Union

An Amateur Detective

by James M'Cabe

The little town of B— was the last place in the world where one would have expected to find a thief. Since the settlement of the colony, it had been famous for its piety and good works, and like the village in the old German legend, it seemed to be proof against the wiles and attacks of the devil. The townspeople prided themselves on this; they boasted that their place was the one bright spot in all the Union, and anyone who could have had the audacity to doubt this for a moment would have been pronounced worse than a heathen. It was the standing boast of the place that as far as crime was concerned, courts of justice were useless in B—. A robbery would have created an excitement in the place equal only to one of those panics which were so common in Wall Street during the trying times of the late civil war; and a murder within the limits of this happy community would have been taken by common consent as the forerunner of the end of all creation. Crime and violence had been unknown in B— for so long that the people were not so unreasonable in their feelings and opinions as they might seem to be at the first glance. Deacon L— had lived in the town, as boy and man, for fifty years, and since his majority, had been a magistrate, and he frequently declared that had he been dependent on this office alone for his support, he would surely have starved. This feeling of security which I have mentioned strengthened day by day, and year by year, until the good people of the town, without really meaning to be self-righteous, came to regard themselves as the salt of the earth.

Imagine, then, the feeling of consternation which spread through the town one fine spring morning, when it was announced that after so many years of… 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?