The News

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

The Murder of the Miser

CHAPTER I

The Murder

The news spread like wildfire—Jacob, the miser, had been murdered.

No one in the village knew anything of his antecedents. The oldest inhabitants, when questioned about him, gave the following stereotyped answer: “He had come to the village about nine months after it had been founded by us, bringing with him an only child, a girl about three years old. He never spoke to anybody except to answer a cheery good morning or good day, and even then he sometimes would not answer a person. He was reputed to be very wealthy, but nobody knew the extent of his wealth, not even his daughter. He had lived (and now had died) in his cabin, which stood on the outskirts of the village. In the cabin there was no bed, but a pile of straw answered the purpose. But one chair was in the room (if room it could be called), and that had but three legs. No clock, no table, or any other article of furniture was to be seen, except a broken-down stove and a tallow candle, which, when lighted, made the room look more dismal than ever. On the straw lay the miser, in a pool of blood, stretched out at full length; beside him sat his daughter, now eighteen years of age, moaning and crying bitterly.

* * * * * * *

“Say, William, did you hear the news?”

The man thus… 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?