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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 Clever Escape

A Detective Story

The train was waiting to leave the station. There had been robberies on the line, and a detective was eagerly watching the faces of the passengers, hoping to catch the thieves. I, the guard, was watching things generally. Presently I caught myself watching a girl who stood alone at some distance. I wished I could have gone straight to her, and put her into one—the most comfortable—of the line of carriages at which she gazed so timidly. Just as I hesitated, a very remarkable figure elbowed its way to me; a stout, grandly-dressed old lady, panting painfully, and almost piercing me with a pair of restless, half-opened eyes, that looked out through the gold-rimmed spectacles perched on her sharp nose. Two porters followed her, laden with bags, cloaks, umbrellas and flowers—the only flowers in the station, I expect, that winter night—and one of the men winked at me over her head, while the other guarded her treasures with a face of concentrated anxiety and thoughts engrossed by possible fees.

“This is the London train, is it ga’ad?” she asked, peering sharply into my face with her half-closed eyes, as if she found it difficult to distinguish me even… 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?