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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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“X” and “H.” A Telegraph Operator’s Story

My temperament, as I am well aware, is very peculiar; in most things I am what might be termed an extremist. Persons and things which I like I am very fond of; and what I have a distaste to I hate from the bottom of my heart, if I may be permitted the use of so strong a term as “hate.”

This characteristic renders life at once pleasant and disagreeable. Beautiful things almost fascinate me, making of earth a heaven; while repulsive things convert this heaven into something far different. Society, fortunately, is made up of such a variety of individuals, each possessing some trait peculiar to himself, that it furnishes a wonderful course of study, and at the same time renders me happy and miserable. This is a long prelude to my story, but a necessary one, as will be perceived ere I am done.

‘Born of poor but respectable parents,’ I was blessed with an excellent opportunity for study; and devoting myself to my books, I, in a short time, accomplished what it would have taken most persons much longer to perform.

By the most earnest endeavor I was enabled to graduate from Harvard, with no little honor. I think I can say with entire freedom from egotism. Having graduated, I was offered a situation as a correspondent for one of our popular journals, which suited me nicely, and which I at once accepted, in as much as I was to travel in and write from Europe. In this way I could visit those time-hallowed places with which I had in a measure become acquainted through my long study of the classics; and certainly nothing can be more pleasing to one interested in the Homer and Virgil, the thrilling utterances of Demosthenes and Cicero, than a personal acquaintance with the places where they lived and died.

While in Venice I made the acquaintance of a gentleman named Simpson, from New York. He was a wealthy merchant,… 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?