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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 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal

Recollections of a Police Officer

The Pursuit

by William Russell

The reader need scarcely be told that albeit police officers, like other men, delight, chiefly, to recount their successful exploits, they do nevertheless, experience numerous and vexatious failures and disappointments. One especially, I remember, the recollections of which did not pass away for several weeks. I had been for some time in pursuit of a rather eminent rascal, though one young in years, and by marriage respectably connected, who by an infamous abuse of the trust reposed in him by the highly respectable firm who employed him, had contrived to possess himself of a large sum of money, with which, or at least with the portion of it falling to his share—for we discovered that he had for some time been connected with a gang of first-rate swindlers—he hoped to escape to America. The chase was hot after him, and spite of his double turnings, and the false scents adroitly thrown out by his confederates, with the view to favor his escape, I at last fairly ran him to earth in Plymouth, though in what precise spot of it he burrowed, I could not for the moment ascertain. Neither was I well acquainted with his features, but in the description of his person furnished me, there were certain indelible marks which, upon strict examination, could not fail to establish his identity. He purposed, I ascertained, to attempt to leave England in a barque bound for New York, which was to sail from Plymouth on the day after I arrived there. Of this I was fully satisfied, and I determined to capture him on board. Accordingly, about half an hour before the ship was to sail, and after all the passengers had embarked, two of the local officers and I got into a boat which I had sometime previously engaged to be in… 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?