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

Old Sam

how a detective found him out

[From the Dark Side of New York Life]

People who live in the Bowery, or the vicinity of Hester street, New York, or who have had occasion to be much in that locality, will probably remember a hobbling old man, somewhat lame, and supporting himself on a thick stick, who was often to be seen there on Sundays, as well as week days, some two years ago. He was decently dressed, but was only known as “Old Sam.” He was supposed to live New Jersey, but no one precisely knew. He was generally taken for a farmer, or for a resident in some little outlying place. People called him also “Lame Sam," and whoever heard his quiet mode of speaking and saw the friendly smile that was always lighting up his lace, must have taken him for a very harmless man. And whoever met him on Sundays wending his way to church with a most devout aspect, must assuredly have thought that he was a very good old man, who was going thither out of pure piety.

But “Lame Sam” was very little of a saint; on the contrary, he was a most arrant… 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?