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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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Ingenious Bank Robberies

A Detective's Story

by C. V. Walls

I had been one of Pinkerton’s detectives two years when I first met Kate Putnam, the prettiest and sweetest girl—to me—that I had ever seen. She was fair as a lily, with eyes of impenetrable blue, cheeks and lips like roses, and a wealth of golden ringlets that captivated me completely. She possessed a well-rounded and rather plump form, and was below the medium height, but as I was rather tall and slender I naturally admired the plumpness that I lacked in my own person; so true it is that we poor mortals desire most that which nature has failed to provide us with.

Kate had been a resident of Blakesburg but a few weeks when I was sent by my chief to perform a little job of detective work in that village, and I first met her at a church fair. I was thrown into her society by purchasing a supper, which was sold by numbers and served in baskets, and, as fate would have it, I luckily drew the number of her basket. As is usual on such occasions, I shared the lunch with her. This was the beginning of an acquaintance that soon ripened into mutual respect and admiration, and later, into love.

I succeeded in securing the evidence in the case I was working up—that of arson—but I was… 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?