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Web Site Showcases
American Detective Fiction

Posting all Detective Fiction
Prior to Conan Doyle

Fully Searchable

It is 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).

We have posted our working bibliography and will add full-text copy of its entries as we prepare them.We have also included important British publications, which are indicated with an asterisk in the bibliography. We welcome comments and solicit both additional bibliographical entries and texts.

Editors:
LeRoy Lad Panek
Mary M. Bendel-Simso

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The Diamonds of the Duke de B—

From the Memoirs of M. Claude, Chief of the Detective Police Under the Second Empire

by M. Claude

In the ancient quarter of Beaujon stands a well-known house of grim and forbidding aspect, Painted in red, its massive gates open —or, rather, do not open—upon a melancholy garden.

The illustrious duke, whose noble ancestors gave a king to England, was just as eccentric as his residence.

He was a personage at once mysterious, disagreeable and sinister. This noble duke possessed in his palace an immense iron safe, holding diamonds to the value of sixteen million francs. He was as avaricious as he was wealthy, while keeping up the gallant traditions of his ancestors. If he sought pleasure, he sought it at a low price. He never opened his immense jewel safe, which was fenced in by safeguards, like a cave of Ali Baba, but for his own pleasure.

I am now mentally looking at his singular personage, whom I have met so often at the little theatres in the stage-boxes, invariably accompanied by an actress.

Seated behind his lady, he never moved, and it was impossible to discover any expression on the impassible face, masked in powder and cosmétiques.

His hair is false, his mustache is false, his whiskers are false, and he moves, I really do believe, by the aid of clockwork. His face is as immovable as that of the Emperor's—can I say more?

Detectives were paid never to let him out of their sight

The Duke de B— had in his service a young Englishwoman, both honest and pretty. He discharged her… 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?