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

The Doctor’s Story

by A Retired Member of the Detective Police [William Russell]

one cold, blustering, snowy night in November, I had reached my home utterly tired and exhausted with my day’s labor; and as I threw myself into the great arm-chair before a blazing fire of bituminous coal, and felt the cozy comfort of my room, the luxury of the warm dry stockings and slippers, the grateful fumes of the tea and steak standing before me on the table, I could not but feel great happiness in the thought that I had nothing further to draw me away from the house that night. I had left each and all of my patients in a state that my services could be dispensed with till morning. This is a circumstance so seldom enjoyed by a physician in good practice, that when it does occur it is looked upon as no common holiday.

I could listen to the mutterings of the wind, and the tapping of the frozen snow against the window-pane, almost with enjoyment, or rather with a feeling that added a zest to what I was partaking of inside.

A blazing fire is provocative of thought, and a cup of tea is no preventive; I sat, therefore, and sipped and thought. I was staring into the blaze, and recalling a hundred days in the past—a hundred incidents, having a chain that led invisibly from my first thought. I recalled the night when I sat in my humble lodging the first day of my arrival in New York, fresh from the small town where I was accounted of some importance among my peers, and how my self-esteem was lowered from my one day’s experience of the great city. I recalled my first entrance in the Medical School, my disgust, and my ambition; the gradual sloughing from the half-rude country lad to the rather stylish city-dressed young man. The going into society, and the first and last real passion of my life, Marianne Graydon, that more than… 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?