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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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Circumstantial Evidence

An Adventure in Western Virginia

The following narrative of a singular and painful adventure in the primeval forests of western Virginia, by one of the early settlers of Kentucky, was found, not long since, among other papers, in an old trunk belonging to a family in this city. It is believed that it has never been published. It might afford an apt illustration of the impropriety of permitting a conviction of a capital offence to be founded on circumstantial evidence. —N. Y. Ledger.

“It was in July, 1783, that I left Richmond to visit some lands my father had given to me, on the western confines of my native State. Virginia at that time extended to the Ohio river, which formed its northern boundary. Traveling was then dangerous. With a population west of the Alleghanies scarcely exceeding five thousand, and an Indian enemy scattered over the country, it was considered an undertaking of no little magnitude to venture on the journey which lay before me. The country had just emerged from a war full of alarm; danger and excitement had become a part of our existence. I had all the enthusiasm of youth, with its ardor and zeal for speculation, and a perseverance which nothing could subdue. Other men had encountered similar dangers, why should I draw back from them? It was a period when men cultivated a certain kind of knight-errantry that sought difficulty, with the expectation of wrestling with it and overcoming it. I was… 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?