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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

Retribution

—or—

Rodden The Gambler

by Mary Orme

“I know you are wondering what ails my hand,” said the captain of our steamboat, who had appeared with his arm in a sling since we went onboard, several days previous. We had made his acquaintance, and liked him, and had wondered about his hand, as he said, but not enough to ask the chambermaid, or the men.

“I am sick of running a steamboat,” said he. “I want a plantation, tho’ maybe some hand would ‘cut up,’ and give me as bad a hurt as this. It is no use telling everything to everybody, but I don’t mind telling you.”

“Seeing it’s you,”said my wife, smiling.

“Yes, ‘seeing it’s you,’ as the peddlers say, I will tell you. I hope, Madam, you will not see any rough work on the river. My word for it, it would use you up mighty quick.”

My wife was an invalid, and we were escaping from the cold and coal-smoke of Cincinnati, to spend the winter in New Orleans.

“On our last trip down,” said the captain, “I observed a party on board that I did not feel very happy to see. I don’t like snags on two legs. The party consisted of a young man, about thirty or thirty five years old, with his wife and a young babe, and his other. The young man was hard, decidedly. He had on a gray coat and pants, and purple velvet vest, with a massive gold chain strung across his breast. He had abundant black hair, which curled, and was redolent of macassar. His face was red and fluffy, and his eyes were black and wicked. He had been good looking, or might have been, if his mother had not brought him up. She was a tall, stately woman, quite as tall as her son, about… 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?