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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 Two Chiefs of the Detective Force

From the Memoirs of M. Claude, Chief of the Detective Force Under the Second Empire

by M. Claude

In 1867, the year of the Exposition—of the interview of the two Emperors and the King of Prussia—the sun of Austerlitz shone for the last time in the heaven of the Second Empire.

Napoleon III., inviting Europe to his fêtes, was startled in the midst of his theatrical glory by the spectre of Maximilian. The Prussians returned to their country, their hearts bitter with envy. All Europe was dazed by the splendor of the Paris of 1867.

One day I was walking in the cylindrical departments of the Exposition, on the lookout for the numerous pickpockets who ran over from London with a view to picking every well-lined pocket in gay and festive Lutetia.

After having strolled through the numerous and splendid cafés of all nations, conducted by schemers gathered together from the four quarters of the world, I struck the department reserved for German industry.

In this there was but a gigantic tube of metal stretched on planks, its open mouth grinning at the sun.

It was the Krupp gun. Somehow or other the sight of this cannon plunged me into a profound reverie. Scarcely had it been placed in position than it became the subject of a joke to the Parisians—they treated the Krupp gun as the armament of another age.

They laughed at a cannon that was loaded at the breech, and pretended that it was a great toy from Nuremberg that the good King William had sent as a gift to his dear little cousin, Napoleon.

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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?