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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

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A Perfect Treasure^*

From Chambers’ Journal

I am not a man to have hobbies—far from it—but everybody, I suppose, likes one thing more than another, and what I like is Plate, good, serviceable gold and silver, such as is pleasant to see upon one’s table, whether by sunshine or candlelight, and which one likes one’s guests to see. It is whispered by malignant persons (so at least certain good natured friends tell me), that I should not give so many dinner parties, if it were not to exhibit these costly articles. I am not conscious of such a motive for my hospitality; but if it exist, it need not surely be objected to; it is I who have to pay for the weakness, and not my friends—as happens in some cases I could name. If I possessed a selection of the most hideous china in the whole world, and filled my drawing rooms with unhappy persons after dinner, who were compelled to bow down before Bel and the Dragon (if I may say so without impiety), as Colonel Twankay does, for instance, then I grant you there would be some ground for complaint; or if I invited people to “at-homes” every Wednesday evening (a most impertinent form of invitation, in my opinion) in order that they should have the pleasure of hearing men confute Professor Piebald upon the question of the Theory of Development, as my good friend Dr. Twistie is in the habit of doing; or if I had a daughter with high notes, and inveigled the unwary with a bait of “a little music,” like my neighbor, the Hon. Mrs. Matcham—so proud and stuck up, that she is as often as not called Lucifer Matcham—who, I dare say, thinks her invitations are quite an honor to the recipients. But there; I have no patience to speak about such people. These, forsooth, are the persons—… 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?

Select Story

A Perfect Treasure*

From Chambers’ Journal

A Perfect Treasure^*