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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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Unpublished Passages

IN THE LIFE OF

Vidocq, The French Minister of Police

No. IX

The Conscript’s Revenge

by J.M.B.

A few leagues from Nismes, in the late province of Languedoc, is the quiet and retired village of St. Perau. Standing some distance from the high road, it is rarely sought except by those having business with the inhabitants, or, at long intervals, by some pedestrian wandering out of the beaten track in search of those beauties of nature which the byways so often present, and are seen with more heartfelt enjoyment when bursting unawares on the sight of some wayworn searcher of the picturesque, than those more gorgeous views in the highroads, the description of which has raised the expectation to the highest pitch, merely to show that the reality always falls far short of the anticipation.

It was in this village that Pierre and Annette had passed their infancy; they were respectively the son and daughter of men who had began life together; had followed the same occupation, that of vine growers, and been for years neighbors and sworn friends; whose common wish too was for a future day to see that friendship more strongly cemented by the marriage of their children. It could not therefore be much a matter of surprise that betwixt their children there was more than friendship. Pierre saw with much delight that few girls for miles around could compete with his little wife, as he called her, either in face or form; and that to be considered like Annette of St. Perau was a compliment many a bright and blue-eyed girl was justly proud of. Annette, too, was never so happy as when in company with Pierre, her partner in the summer dance, or wandering with him beside the river Gardon, listening to his projects for the future, when they were man and wife.

When Pierre… 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?