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 Great Jewel Robbery

There is a strange and too often a fearful history attached to every great gem of price, many of which, while flashing on the brow of beauty, or in some regal or imperial ornament, are dimmed to the thoughtful mind by the tears shed over them, or by the blood in which they have too often been bathed. Robbery and murder have ever been mingled with the stories of precious gems; and as a peaceful man, living in these highly civilized times, I have more than once felt my life to be far from safe as soon as it was known that in the little black leathern case I carried, or even in the scrap of tissue-paper in my waistcoat pocket, I held so many valuable diamonds, rubies, or sapphires.

One gets used to it in time; but at first there is a strong feeling that every person who looks at you, or says a word about the weather, is bent upon murder and robbery. You live a solitary life during your travels. You get in the farthest corners of carriages. You would not ride alone in a first coupe with some strange traveler, upon any consideration, even if that strange traveler were a feeble old woman, since you would certainly suppose her to be a ruffian in disguise. Elegantly dressed ladies become swindlers’ accomplices; clerical gentlemen, the swindlers themselves; and distrust of everybody and everything becomes the bane of your existence. Your wine or tea seems to be drugged, your food poisoned; and once, at a hotel where I was staying, I had serious thoughts about giving the proprietor into custody for supplying me with medicated soap.

I will not mention the name of the Bond Street firm with which I was some years ago connected, but let it suffice that their name was well known, and that the manufacture of more than one regal diadem had been intrusted to their skilled workmen. I was with them some twelve or fourteen years, and it was during that period that the incident I am about to… 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?