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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

Two Men and Two Women

“There’s a pretty creature for you.”

“You think so?”

Myself and my wife, “ego et rex meus”—I put myself first because speech number one is of my making. Speech number two, Fanny’s, properly a statement of fact, became a question from a certain rising inflection of the voice, likewise of the eyebrows.

It was at No. 8 Endicott Place—a private boarding-house distinguished from others of its class by being situated within a stone’s throw of the State House, within two rods of Beacon Street, and by being the temporary abode of Israel P. Gorch and his wife Frances. (P. for Putnam, and although it is a matter entirely personal to myself, perhaps it may be permitted me to state that it is a custom in our family to christen every eldest child Israel Putnam. My twin sister Isa and myself constitute a dual example of this filial practice, the reason whereof is apparent from the fact that the Gorches, in common with a thousand other people, are descended by ordinary generations from the hero who dragged the wolf from his cave, and who cantered down the stone stairs at—— Really I forget where. The Heights of Abraham we’ll say by way of rounding the sentence. And as, according to the catechism, all of us sons of Adam, six thousand years ago, “sinned in him, and fell with him in the first… 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?