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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

Select Story

Monday

The wide river blazed with sunset light; the air was full of the scent of magnolias. There was no sight that was not beautiful, no sound that was not sweet, at Vue d’Liere.

A pink glow fell over Emma Haughton’s figure as she stood on the wide lawn among the cape myrtle, all in pink flower, the hem of her white dress sweeping the sward.

Nothing could have been more exquisite than the pure curves of her face, nothing more perfect than the infantile gold of her clustering hair. And her beauty suited the delicacy and sweetness of her spirit.

She was waiting for her husband. You would not have thought that she had a husband, she was so very young, so girlish, so flower-like. But she had been Guy Haughton’s wife for six months, and he was young and handsome and happy as she. But she had aways lived in seclusion at Vue d’Liere. It had been her patrimony.

Guy Haughton, who had moved in the great world for five and twenty years, knew more of its evil than she had ever dreamed.

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?