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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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My Cry for Help

by A.H.T.

I am not naturally of a vindictive nature, far from it, but if there is any one thing that I nourish a fierce hatred for it is a thorough race-course scoundrel; you may call him what you like, welsher, three-card man, roulette-table keeper, pickpocket, thief, for his vocation merely varies with opportunity.

Almost every created animal, I believe, man included, has a violent antipathy to some body or thing. It is a recognized fact that the most plethoric of bulls cannot calmly graze with a red object in view, no matter whether it be the sash of the matador or a petticoat; provided only it is of the obnoxious colour at it he goes half frenzied with rage.

The ‘rough’ has mortal dread and aversion to either a policeman or soap and water; the garrotter in loud outcries protests against the inhumanity of flogging; while the mamma of the period (if she will pardon me for introducing her in such company) shows by a cold manner, vulgarly styled as ‘snubbing,’ or by a sudden interest in nothing at all going on in an opposite direction, that the object of her peculiar detestation, the younger son, approaches. Well then, as I said before, I confess to an indomitable hatred for all sorts and conditions of race-course swindlers. I wage fierce war against the three-card man; having studied his craft for the purpose, I glory in taking an occasional half-crown or two from his ill-gotten gains; and if, as is very often the case, he is one too many for me, I deliberately set the police at him.

I draw the betting-ring for the welsher, and head him too if I can, as he steals away, and, stonyhearted, wonder, after he has been stripped, whether I could proceed against him under Lord Campbell’s Act,… 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?