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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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By a Hair’s Breadth

by Piercy Wilson

chapter first

guilty or not guilty?

“‘But was he really murdered?’ Well, that’s a pretty question. Why, Grosfils, mon enfant, you must have taken leave of your senses to make such a suggestion. Did not the poor fellow proclaim the fact before he succumbed to his tortures? Did he not, also, tacitly denounce the assassin? And are the laws of the nation to be outraged with impunity, because the most direct proofs of the crime cannot possibly be furnished? Ma parole d’honneur vous me faites rire avec de pareilles balicernes.”

The speaker was a portly, middle-aged gentleman, whose blue eyes and florid face, capped by a mass of light brown curly hair, showed him to be of German extraction. There was not in Pau a man better known, or more generally esteemed, than Monsieur Swarz, the Police Commissioner, whose only fault was, perhaps, an overweening confidence in his own perceptive and deductive faculties[.] The individual he thus addressed in this serio-comic vein, was a government detective, with coarsely formed features half hidden by a luxuriant beard and moustache. As he listened to the banter of his chief, he was rolling a cigarette between his fingers, but when he raised his head, one could but observe a striking peculiarity in his physiognomy, in the dark flashing eyes, which almost imparted a shade of beauty to his otherwise homely face. Grosfils was never known to laugh, as other mortals do, his hilarity being distinguished by a quiet chuckle, and countless wrinkles that puckered round those twinkling orbs, which, however, were generally masked under a… 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?