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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]

The Land Passage

by Charles Castleton

I had disposed of my American cargo and taken in a load of fruits and wines at Messina, in Sicily, for the States. My owners had an agent, or consignee in Toulon, and thither I was to go and get a sum of money that he had in his hands belonging to our American company. A month before, while stopping a day at Gibraltar on my inward passage to the Mediterranean, I had despatched a letter to M. Paul Guettard, by a French steamer bound direct for Toulon, and in that note I informed him that I should call on him for the money on my return. As soon as my cargo was all on board, I sailed for Toulon, where I was admitted without quarantine; but I found that Mr. Guettard was not there. He had left a note for me, however, in which he informed that sickness prevented his meeting me as I had requested. He was at Brignolle, a town some twenty miles back in the country to the northward and eastward, and in his letter he informed that there was no one in Toulon with whom he could have well left the business, and that if I would come to Brignolle, he would let me have the money, though he should be obliged to give me a draft on a house in Marseilles for a part of it.

I knew that it was my duty to get the money, for our company needed it, though I did not fancy this land-passage at all. However, there was no help for it, so I made up my mind to go. If I was to have a draft to be cashed at Marseilles, then of course I should have to visit that city also, and as Marseilles was nearer to Brignolle than was Toulon, I thought it a waste of time and travel to rejoin my ship in the latter place, so I got a “clean bill of health” from the quarantine officer, or physician, and having given it to my mate, I directed him to take the ship around to Marseilles, and there wait for me.

This being… 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?