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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 Woman of Mystery

Remarkable Story of New York’s Great Female Detective

The Daughter of a United States Senator as a Ferreter of Crime

[From the New York Mercury]

People moving in the best society of this city have been puzzled during the present and the previous three or four winters about a mysterious lady who had appeared at most of the select soirees, parties and gatherings which have taken place. She has been the cynosure of all eyes at both public and private establishments in which the bon-ton have been guests. In the Fifth Avenue, Twenty-Third Street or Thirty-Fourth Street mansions she has been the envy of the ladies and the admiration of the gentlemen equally as at the balls and concerts at the Academy or at Irving Hall. She dresses handsomely, in the richest apparel, without ostentatious display, and yet diamonds and precious stones glisten from her ear-drops and upon her fingers. She is tall, slim, with well-developed bust, tapering waist, and a queenly head appropriately adorned with luxuriant tresses, set upon well-rounded and sloping shoulders. She is most graceful and agile in her movements, perfectly at ease in society, indicating that she has been accustomed to the companionship of the cultured, opulent and refined. When she smiles she displays two rows of pearly teeth, and those who are intimate with her declare she is a most remarkable conversationalist. She is a brunette, and her rapid speech, frequent gesticulation and sibilant utterance would indicate foreign birth. She speaks

ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN AND SPANISH EQUALLY

well, and conjectures as to her nationality are numerous and indeterminate. It has been gravely asserted… 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?