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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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Miss Anstruther’s Diamonds

by Caroline Conrad

“You know, dear, we are not in the least bit in love with each other,” Lucy Basset said, reaching up to pull my whiskers, and laying a coaxing cheek against my shoulder. “It would be very foolish for you and me to fall in love with each other; and we just won’t—there!”

And to emphasize the declaration, the softest little fingers n the world being still twisted in my whiskers, pulled my face down to a level with hers; and this girl who was not in the least bit in love with me, kissed me!

There’s a great many different ways of kissing, you know. There are cold lips, and dry lips, and oily lips that glide past your face like ghosts, and lips that you’d rather have a blow than kisses from; but Lucy’s kisses were like half-opened rose-buds, at five o’clock of a June morning.

Lucy herself was a whole garden of roses—dew, color, fragrance, and all. When she looked at you felt as if your whole heart was exhaling at your eyes; and when she smiled upon you, it did not matter what sort of thunder and lightening there was in any other part of the globe, it was distilled sunshine where you were. I don’t know if Lucy were pretty, but she had a lot of pretty characteristics. She was all quality, like golden wine that is better the longer you keep it, and that gets a new flavor every time you taste it—a more molten sparkle every time it drips over the beaker’s brim.

The beauty of her eyes was in their expression; of her hair in its brightness. Her face was a blossom, her hands birds, and if the white wings of her fingers fluttered across your horizon, you might as well be blind for all seeing anything else but her. In short, you see I was in love with Lucy, if Lucy was not in love with me; and it is my private opinion that we were very much in love with each other, in spite of Mrs. Anstruther’s parting admonition, that we were… 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?