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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

The Fatal Potato

“One of the queerest cases I ever had,” said the old detective, “occurred something over twenty years ago. Then I still had much to learn in my business, and, fortunately for me, knew that I had. It was memorable as an illustration of the importance of small things, and I have pigeon holed it in my memory as the ‘affair of the fatal potato.’

“A red headed servant girl, so scared that her eyes stood out like lobster’s, rushed into the station house early one morning, howling that all the police were wanted around at Mr. Morton’s. The sergeant at the desk, supposing there was probably just some row among the servants, grinned at the sight of her and asked what was the matter.

“She gave a whoop of ‘murder’ that raised his hair and startled everyone in the station. The idea of murder in the aristocratic mansion of Mr. Samuel Morton, on Fifth avenue, within five blocks of the station, naturally rather excited us. Two detailed men and myself—I was then ward detective—ran around there as quickly as we could.

“Sure enough, there had been a murder. The cook, a sturdy built, middle aged Englishwoman named Harriet Wardrop, lay on the kitchen floor, in the back basement, with a dirty cotton handkerchief twisted and knotted about her neck,… 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?