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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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Trailing A Crime

by An English Ex-Detective

I have not a great story of the marvelous to relate, but what I have to say possesses the merit of being absolutely true.

About a dozen years ago complaints were continuously made to us of repeated robberies from a luggage train, which at that time was doing service between London and a certain provincial town which I will call Hubbleton.

Time after time, in spite of the traffic manager’s strictest vigilance, valuable freight was stolen, and the thief or thieves remained undetected. The most mysterious part of the affair was that not unfrequently the missing goods consisted of very heavy and cumberous articles, such, for instance, as bales of raw wool, heavy pieces of finished woolen cloths, and now and again bags of logwood, boxes of indigo, &c.

The guards of certain trains were keenly questioned, their every movement was observed,—in fact the company’s own detectives placed the whole of the servants under the most watchful surveillance.

Still, consignors and consignees continued to complain, dispatched materials remained undelivered, and, as a consequence, the directors were made to smart pretty sharply in the shape of awarded compensation.

It was at this ruinous juncture that my services were called into requisition.

“Sleeky” (that is the nickname I was best known by then), said the inspector to me one morning, “I have got an intricate little matter I want you to undertake. The Grangewood Limited Liability Company have compromised that job you have been working, consequently you are the only member I have disengaged at the present moment.”

He gave me the details of the case, which I have just recited, suggested a few important hints, and concluded by advising me to take a day or two so as to deliberate my plans for attack.

“Of course you know the importance of the thing,” he said just… 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?