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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

Select Story

The Conspiracy

by Thomas Waters

The repudiated or unacknowledged claims upon the British Government, some of them for fabulous sums, all amount to a respectable national debt, and scores of individuals fall into poverty and untimely graves, in vain pursuit of a glittering bubble, ever dancing before their eyes, and ever just—only just—beyond their reach. The advent of a new First Lord of the Treasury, is the signal of a general revival from uneasy slumber of demands, which, shamefully ignored or neglected by his predecessor in office, will, write the unteachable solicitors, “be sure to meet with due appreciation from the distinguished statesman, to whom the favor of a gracious sovereign, and the suffrages of an enlightened people have entrusted the honor and interests of the great British nation—which honor and interests can never be more effectually promoted than by doing justice to the meanest alike with the mightiest of that sovereign’s subjects,” It is surprising, too, or at least it would be surprising to those who do not from experience know how slight a thread of colored cobweb will retain persons otherwise sane in the consuming idleness, gradually changing to equally idle despair, of the fool’s paradise of visionary hope,—to observe upon how slight and fanciful a foundation they continue to erect their air-drawn castles, I once knew a mathematician, of all men in the world, whom the following merely formal note uplifted to the seventh heaven from the slough of despond into which he was fast sinking, with some hope on his friends’ part that he would at last touch the bottom, and rebound therefrom by his own latent energy into the clear and healthful atmosphere of genuine working-day life.

“Whitehall,
“I am directed by Lord Melbourne to acknowledge the receipt of your memorial and accompanying… 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?