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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

Select Story

Under the Froth

Few know the varieties of life in a city—still fewer have seen its many phases of guilt and folly, its pride and extravagance. One is hid by a mantle of darkness—the other flashes in deceptive light. But to one who has passed from beneath the froth and foam where the evil abides and the pure is unknown, to the glitter and brightness which gilds the votaries of society and fashion, an experience is found which no mere observer can acquire. Such a career would derive an interest, not from its strangeness alone, but the folly it has met with and the duplicity it encounters.

I will tell you of a case in point. It has not been many years since the strange disappearance of a prominent merchant aroused popular inquiry to an unusual extent, and revealed at last a crime which for adventurous boldness, impudence, and successful cunning, is almost without a parallel.

It is useless to name the parties, since there are those still living who will recognize the facts, disguise the characters as I may. It will suffice to describe the person I mean as a bachelor, who, by the practice of severe economy and the employment of great natural sagacity, acquired a large fortune. The taint of selfishness, however, clung to him, and the proverbial reputation of a miserly character excluded… 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?