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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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A Mountain Adventure

Few men in the Secret Service have attained a higher reputation or encountered more perils that Ambrose Beckham. I knew him for years before I could ever prevail on him to recount any of his adventures; but meeting him in Boston, about a year ago, I succeeded in getting several interesting stories from him, among them the following, which he related in his modest way:

Not many summers ago, well executed fifty-cent notes were widely circulated in the Southwest, and for a time all efforts to trace them to their source were in vain. Four detectives—Messrs. Melhorn, Wilson, Baird and myself—had followed a fancied clue to Knoxville, Tennessee, where all trace disappeared. My companions were convinced that we were on a false scent, and resolved to depart for Richmond, Virginia, from which base they had reason to believe they could work successfully. I did not share their views, and remained in Knoxville, with an understanding that we should communicate by telegraph, in cipher.

They departed, and had barely time to reach Richmond, when, just as I was beginning to grow discouraged, I made a discovery that led me to believe—in fact to feel sure—that that the skillful counterfeiting was not done in any city or large town, as we had conjectured, but in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee or Western North Carolina. I immediately sent an explanatory dispatch to my friends in Richmond, and started southeastward, intending… 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?