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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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Sentenced to Death

by Paul Read

The following thrilling episode was related to me by a gray-haired old gentleman named Wayne, whose acquaintance I chanced to make a few years ago:

I was just twenty-three years old when the incident I am about to relate took place.

I was residing in the flourishing town of Wilmington, and was book-keeper for Blair & Parker, bankers.

I had a salary of eight hundred a year, and was toiling on, practicing the greatest economy, and hoping for the time I should be able to marry Lillie Worth, to whom I had been engaged for almost a year.

Sweet Lillie Worth, how I loved her!

She was the only child of a widow lady, and was an exquisitely beautiful maiden. Blue-eyed, golden-haired, cherry-lipped, and with a complexion pure and stainless as the lily petal, she seemed to me the embodiment of all that was beautiful and good.

From the moment that my eyes first rested upon her lovely face, I loved her, and my love was fully returned.

We became engaged, and only waited an increase of my salary to be married; and though the time seemed far off, yet we were young and hopeful, and willing to wait.

Jonas Blair, the senior partner of the firm for which I worked, was a man destitute of every generous impulse. Avaricious, passionate, and extremely overbearing to those in his employ, over whom he affected every superiority, he was time-serving and cringing to those whom wealth or position placed above him. Flattery melted him to meanness, and at the slightest offense he would bristle with resentment.

I believe that he had a secret grudge against me, for I could never do anything to please him. I bore with the sneers and insults until flesh and blood could bear no longer. Then we quarreled. He, unprovokedly, insulted me deeply. I answered hotly, and then we had a fiery dispute, which ended by his dismissing me… 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?