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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 Sibyl’s Augury

From a Physician’s Diary

by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.

It was in ‘forty-eight that, young in my profession, I settled in Greyburn. I had spent my full term at college, and had also given almost two years of my time to studying and practicing in the hospitals of Europe; and I am pleased to be able to state that very shortly after settling in the aforementioned place I had as much business as I could conveniently attend to. In two or three cases of fearful threatening aspect I had met with happy success; and a successful man people are willing to trust. And then, again, being fresh from the very best surgical school in the world—the Academy of Louis XV., in Paris—I very quickly and emphatically made my mark upon the public mind in the result of several capital operations which I had occasion to perform.

I had been almost a year in Greyburn, and had become so well satisfied with the people, and they, in turn, had given token of being so well satisfied with me, that I had fully concluded to regard it as my permanent abiding place. It was on a clear, pleasant evening in May that I was visited by a gentleman from the neighboring town of Foxborough. He had called during the day, in my absence, and had left his card, with word that he would remain in town until he could see me. The card bore the name of “ADAM GREGORY, D.D.,” and I knew him at once for the Principal of the Theological Seminary in the town mentioned. He was a middle-aged, mild-faced gentleman, with one of those marked organizations in which no amount of intellectual or mental disturbance can overcome the inate disposition to kindliness and frankness.

Mr. Gregory took a seat in my office, and regarded me attentively before he introduced his business. I knew very well that he was measuring the outward signs of my fitness for his purpose. Presently his hands were suffered to rest easily one… 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?