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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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The Stolen Sovereigns

AN ENGLISH STORY

When I was sixteen years of age, I was sent for a couple of years’ superior polishing, to an establishment for young ladies, kept by a very distinguished lady whom I will call Mrs. Furnival.

Mrs. Furnival prided herself on receiving pupils of the first-class only, and of educating them in such first-rate style as to render them polished ornaments of the most fashionable drawing-rooms on passing from her school-rooms. The horror of her life was not ignorance, but gaucherie; the object of all her teaching not so much wisdom as elegance. To be awkward or vulgar was, in Mrs. Furnival’s eyes, almost criminal.

We naturally took kindly to life at Maldon Lodge, and I think there were none who looked forward with any eagerness to the time of leaving school.

A rebel, however, found her way into the orderly ranks of Mrs. Funival’s young ladies—a daring little rebel of seventeen, fresh from the wilds of Australia, the daughter of some distinguished person out there, and the heiress, we were told, of an almost fabulous fortune.

I remember her well, in spite of this lapse of years: I remember vividly every… 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?