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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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Was He Dead?

IN the fickle glow of ruddy firelight the great egg of the dinornis swung solemnly through its long arc of motion. There are five eggs of the dinornis in the known world: four are in great museums, and the fifth belongs to my friend Purpel, and is one of the oddest of his many curiosities. The room I enter is spacious, and clad warmly with dark rows of books. Above them the walls are irregularly hidden by prints, pictures, and the poisoned weapons of savage tribes—dark and sombre javelin and arrow—with awful security of death about them, and none of the cold, quick gleam of honest steel. The light flashes on a great brass microscope with its sheltering glass, and half reveals in corners an endless confusion of the dexterous apparatus born of modern science. The glittering student-lamp on the central writing-table stands unlighted, deep in that comfortable confusion of letters, books, and papers, which is dear to certain men I know, and to them only is not confusion. Just above these a thread of steel wire held suspended the giant egg of the dinornis, which, as I have said, was now swinging in a vast round of motion, like a great white planet through the lights and shades of eternal space.

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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?