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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

Select Story

No. 12, Lowndes Square

by Thomas Waters

The failure of Justice in the remarkable case of Sheen, or Shea, the child-slayer, excited, it will be remembered, feelings of uncontrollable surprise and anger in the minds of the British community. Sheen, who kept a raffish public-house in Saint Gile’s, London, cut off, in a fit of drunken rage, literally cut off, his child’s head. He was arraigned for the murder, and ultimately acquitted—the popular notion being that he escaped conviction in consequence of having been indicted in a wrong name. This was a misconception. The result was a gross blot in the records of English criminal practice; but not quite so bad as that. Mike Sheen was indicted by the name, if I remember rightly, of Michael Shea, and a true bill for willful murder was returned by the grand jury. The prisoner pleaded not guilty; and Mr. Adolphus, the then Old Bailey counsel par excellence, objected that the accused’s name was Mike Shea, as set forth in the verdict of wilful murder returned by the coroner’s inquisition. In those days a judge had no power to amend any clerical error in an indictment; and Mr. Burbage, junior counsel for the Crown (his leader, Mr. Alley, being absent for the moment), consented, the Recorder concurring, that Shea should be tried on the inquisition. Mr. Adolphus saw his chance and seized it. In his seemingly careless, off-handed way, he said, that if that were to be done, it would be necessary to take a formal verdict of acquittal under the bill found by the grand jury. The Recorder acquiesced; the formal verdict was given, and recorded, as of course, by the clerk of arraigns. The prisoner was then charged as Mike Shea, upon the inquisition; Mr. Alley, who had returned into Court, was about to open the case for the Crown, when Mr. Adolphus objected that the prisoner had been already tried for the alleged crime, and acquitted—his plea, in technical phrase… 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?