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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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A Flash of Lightning

I am not a detective by profession; indeed, I should not care to be one. I am simply a reporter for one of the New York Daily papers. But either by sheer chance or because of some especial mental gifts, I have been enabled several times to unearth the bottom facts in criminal cases which had sorely puzzled the members of the detective force. So that now, whenever a particularly interesting murder, robbery or disappearance takes place, it seems to have become a matter of course in the office that I should be the one detailed to write it up.

The west side affair, however, came into my hands by chance, pure and simple. My wife wanted to go to the theatre. It was a warm evening in June, and I was not anxious to go; but what my wife wills usually takes place, and we went. After the play I would have taken the nearest route to the Brooklyn ferry and home. For some reason, but known to herself, my wife preferred to return by the one elevated railroad which happened to be the furthest from the theatre, though distant growlings of thunder warned us of approaching storm, and we had no umbrella. I love peace even better than a dry coat, so we walked across town and took a train on that road. We were the only occupants of the rear car. She took a seat by an open window, while I busied myself with my note book.

The storm was coming on rapidly, the thunder growing… 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?