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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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The Borrowed Diamonds

by Anne Taylor Clarke

“I say, Jackson, I wonder how Graham manages to dress his wife so well—he is only a book-keeper?”

“Just what I was thinking about. He is our book-keeper, so I know what his salary is, and I can’t imagine how he pays his board and keeps up such an appearance such times as these. His wife must have some means of her own.”

“Not at all. She was a poor girl, earning her own living, when Graham married her.”

“Well, my salary is the same as his, and if I thought I could dress a wife half as well as he dresses his, I would marry tomorrow. I shall ask him how he manages.”

This conversation occurred between the friends Jackson and Anderson while walking on Fifth avenue one Sunday afternoon, after meeting Graham and his pretty young wife. Mrs. Graham’s dress certainly was rich enough to excite the attention of her husband’s fellow clerks. The heavy crimson silk dress, black corded silk sack, and white tulle bonnet trimmed with real blonde, with crimson roses inside and strings of the same color, besides her parasol, gloves, lace handkerchiefs, were indeed too costly to suit the bookkeeper’s salary, had he been obliged to pay for them; but the various articles which made up this handsome costume were birthday presents from relatives of Mr. Graham’s. These relatives took a lively interest in the young couple, and knowing that Mr. Graham’s income was insufficient to dress his wife as other members of the society in which he moved, they made up the deficiency by timely presents. These relatives had not been very well pleased when Mr. Graham married Nellie Smith. She earned her own living and belonged to a family beneath the Grahams in the social scale, but they were too… 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?