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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

A Left-Luggage Story

by William Hooper

Six months ago, I was unexpectedly summoned to town by a letter from my London solicitors, Messrs. Smith and Son, on urgent business, the precise nature of which it is unnecessary to specify here. Living as I do some miles from a post-town, I do not get my letters until far into the morning, and it was only by dint of a hard gallop, that I succeeded in reaching the station at Buntford just as the mid-day up-express came steaming in. As I passed the bookstall, I called out for a copy of the day’s Times, but was answered by a gaping boy that he had none—not in yet, or all out—I forget which. Being pressed for time, and moreover haunted by a vague dread of the five dreary unoccupied hours before me, I, with less than my usual discretion, flung down a shilling on the counter, and having caught up at random the first of the row of monthly magazines that came to hand, hastened to secure my seat in a first-class carriage. The compartment in which I found myself was empty, but it seemed that I was not long to have it to myself; for the opposite seat—I had taken one next to the window, with my back to the engine—was occupied by a gentleman’s hat-box and railway-rug, and a portmanteau was stowed away underneath. The rug—I think I see it before my eyes now—was of a shaggy brown outside, lined with a running pattern of black and blue. The hat-box was labeled, “Wm. Hooper, passenger to London.”

The comfort of a journey, of a long one especially, depends in so great measure on the nature of one’s fellow-travelers, that it is not to be wondered at that my eye dwelt rather long on the name, while I fell into speculations as to its possessor, and whether he would turn out a good, bad, or indifferent companion.… 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?