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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

Select Story

Leaf the First

The Silver Pin

by John Williams

I had not been settled long in New York, before I was engaged in a large number of cases, and, fortunately for me, I was successful in by far the greater portion of them. I became very popular, and there was not a single case of importance in which there was any doubt, but what I was consulted in it.

One day I was walking at a rapid pace down Broadway when I suddenly felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned quickly round, and who should it prove to be but my old school-fellow, Harry Markham.

“Why, Harry, my boy,” said I, “how are you?”

“Why Jem,” he replied, shaking me cordially by the hand, “I little expected to find you in New York. I thought you were in Stansfield buried among your medical books.”

“I have left physic, and turned detective officer,” I returned, and then I told him in a few words what had passed. “But you, Harry, what are you doing?”

“I’m in luck,” he replied. “I have got a situation as a private secretary to a Mr. Percival, a gentleman of wealth, living near Washington. He gives me a thousand dollars a year, and my board and lodging. I am to take charge of his money matters. I think it is rather an easy… 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?