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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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A Sewer Rat

A Leaf From a Detective's Life

Do you ask me if there was not something extraordinary connected with my marriage? Well, I must confess that the incidents which brought it about were rather singular, and if you care to hear how it all happened, seat yourself comfortably in that old armchair, and I will do my best to interest you in the relation of what was really a very strange adventure.

Old Solomon Denton was a hard case truly, and if he had been alone in the world, respectable people would have had nothing to do with him. In his younger days he was as good as the best in our town, for his ancestors were among the original settlers of the place; and, when his father died, leaving him the proprietorship of the oldest and most famous inn then known in that neighborhood, no young man in Rivermouth had better prospects, or was more universally liked.

But time brings many changes. Rivermouth, from a small town, grew to be a large city, and Sol Denton grew to be a hard case, as I have said. The change was gradual in both cases, but not less certain in one than in the other. Love of company and jollity led to the ruin of the landlord of the Bear’s Head Inn, and when the town had grown large enough to have a city’s reputation for wickedness, Solomon had the reputation of being one of the worst men in it. At the time of which I am speaking he was about fifty years old, and was known as a professional gambler, while the Bear’s Head had degenerated into a third-rate tavern and gaming-saloon, frequented solely by sporting men, or, as the police shrewdly suspected, by characters of a still worse type.

But Denton was by no means cast out of good society even then. In the prime of his manhood, when everything looked fair… 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?