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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

A Brilliant Confidence Swindle in High Life

by Allan Pinkerton

In looking over the events of my most eventful life, as the frequency of criminal occurrences of similar often compels me to do, I cannot but reflect over the strange gullibility of the general public, and wonder at the great fertility of schemes and successful conspiracies on the part of criminals. Every day of the year some apparently new development in the way of criminal ingenuity is apparent, and the best detective of the time are constantly kept at their keenest friction to devise some means and expedients to cope with the advanced and apparently cultivated brains that are forever busy with fresh devices for living a life of elegance and ease without honest labor.

And yet to one who has spent the greater part of his life, as I have done, in conscientiously studying the philosophy of crime and the peculiar traits and characteristics of criminals, there appears to be nothing startlingly new in all these matters. There is change in manner of operation, there may be fresh method in execution, but the main principle of crime, as well as of its detection, always remains the same; and with the thousands upon thousands of warnings and public lessons coming to light every year, it would almost seem that respectable citizens refuse to profit by the bitter experience of others, and by their apparent implicity and unguardedness really invite upon themselves the manipulations of keen rogues and educated rascals; and so true is this of people of all grades of society, that… 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?