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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

Select Story

Catching Counterfeiters

An Interesting Yarn Spun by an Old Government Detective

I was a night telegraph operator, and in the summer of ‘72, feeling much depressed in spirits and badly in need of rest, I decided to tear myself away from the confusion and turmoil of city life and seek some quiet, secluded nook where I might do nothing but sleep and dream for two weeks at least at least, writes an old detective in the Chicago Times. But where could I go? A happy thought struck me, in looking over some old letters, to visit my old friend Will Wilmington, whom I had not seen for years, and whose shingle of “M.D.” I knew to be swinging in the balmy breezes of Mississippi. A hastily written letter brought the following reply by telegram a few days later:

Natchez, July 12.—Come at once. Daisy and I need you.
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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?