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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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From the Overland Monthly

An Inexplicable Fancy

Frenchmen or Frenchwomen are tragic, or nothing, unless they happen to be comical. Nature had endowed the Gallic mind with an adroit aptness and seizes with equal facility upon the terrible or the grotesque, a revolution or a masquerade. This, by way of preface, and the story of “an inexplicable fancy” begins:

Henri Cardone was a young French artist of distinguished promise. His neat little domicile and his pretty little wife were situated in suburban Paris. One early twilight in the month of November of a certain year, as he entered his home, his wife ran unto him, twined her plump arms around his neck, bestowing a full-blown affection upon his responsive lips, and immediately exclaimed, “O, dear, Henri! I had such a surprise, such an odd visitor, this afternoon; a man with such an inexplicable fancy that I have been waiting these two hours for your arrival, and (bestowing a playful cut thereupon) your ears.

“And now these ears have arrived, Irene, my pet, I suppose your merry tongue will tattle away as glibly as a new wound up music-box; and once started, I shall not have an opportunity to put a word in even edgewise until you have run down completely. But for this old man, with the ‘inexplicable fancy.’ He could not have taken a fancy to you, for that would have been neither odd nor inexplicable. Did he, utterly regardless of the divine set of his trousers, go down upon his knees and beseech of you to fly with him to some intensely rural retreat, there to subsist upon moonshine and his adorable moustache? and was it his inexplicable fancy that you should be accompanied by such little articles of available value as this poor hovel might afford? Or, was he a wandering Gypsy lord, who predicted that you were to be the Queen of all proud French, instead of one humble heart? And… 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?