The News

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

A Double Mystery

The Strange Things a Guest at a Chicago Hotel Heard and Saw

Mysterious Occupants of a Room for Transients and Their Dark Secret

Astonishing Developments at the Palmer House—Detectives Outwitted

There have been for many months vague references to a strange story that an occupant of one of the rooms at the Palmer House might tell if she would. As a matter of fact this story was told to a representative of The Inter Ocean, and is given below. Its bearings on a mystery that has been frequently before the public, and which is still unsolved, furnishes a good reason for giving it entire:

“I am not a nervous person but there was always in my mind a slight feeling of anxiety about that door. I had often before at hotels had doors communicating with my room—doors simply locked or bolted, and they had never worried me. But from the first evening of my arrival at the Palmer House that particular door was on my mind.

“I have a few superstitions—we all have. There are two or three that have outlived my childish days that no effort of will can entirely suppress. They crop out at odd times and places and cause a nervous… 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?