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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 Defense Without Evidence

Many years ago, when I had been just long enough at the bar to begin to attract notice, and to convince my seniors that it was not always safe to encounter me without preparation, I found myself, on a certain occasion, in the course of my circuit travels, at the village of B., a frontier county seat in one of the southwestern states.

It was Saturday evening, and court was to commence on the following Monday. I was busy in my room at the tavern—the only one the place contained—looking over a bundle of depositions in the single case I had come there to try, when a gentle tap at my door interrupted my labors.

“Come in!” I somewhat gruffly responded; for the contents of the documents which engaged my attention were not of a character to promote either amiability, or any very sanguine hopes of the case to which they pertained.

The door was timidly opened, when a plainly dressed female, young, and of a prepossessing though saddened expression of countenance, entered the room. By the courtesy of my manner, I made the only atonement in my power for a seeming rudeness for which it was impossible to offer a more direct apology, and handing a chair, I invited her to be seated. After a moment’s hesitation—

“You are Mr. C., I presume?” she said inquiringly.

“Yes, madam.”

“I have called to see you in reference to my husband,” she said in a tremulous tone; “he is to be tried at the court which comes on day after tomorrow, on a most fearful charge, but indeed, indeed sir, he is quite innocent.”

A burst of tears choked her utterance, and it was some moments before she had recovered sufficient composure to be able intelligibly to answer the questions by which I, at length, succeeded in eliciting her story.

It was briefly this:

Shortly after her marriage to William Preston, which had taken place in Kentucky, she had accompanied her husband to… 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?