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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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Leaf the Nineteenth

The Broken Cent

by John Williams

(A Leaf from a Lawyer’s Note-Book.)

(I am indebted to one of my friends for this incident, as well as for the other two which follow. J.B.)

I never was in a gambling-house but once in my life, and that was many years ago. I might have forgotten the circumstance, had it not been connected with an affair that made an indelible impression on my mind. It was in the year 1844, that professional business called me to the city of Baltimore, in the state of Maryland. I was engaged in a patent case, and expected to be there a week. One of the witnesses in the case was a young man named George Broughton, a particular friend of mine, so that the trip promised to be an agreeable one, as we were to travel and room together, during our absence from home.

It was a beautiful spring day when we started on our journey and reached Baltimore the same evening. We drove to Barnum’s Hotel, and were soon installed in comfortable quarters. After supper, we strolled about the beautiful city; we could but admire its cleanliness, and the picturesque appearance of the streets. I remember very well, we were struck with the view of the city at night, from the elevation on which the Washington Monument is erected. It was a glorious moonlight night, and not a single cloud obscured the blue vault of heaven. Here and there, the sky was dotted with some large star, which shared the glory of the silvery moon. The air was balmy, and the city as calm and still as if we had been in a desert. We sat down on the parapet surrounding the monument, and turned our faces to the south. We both uttered an exclamation of admiration at the same moment. Before us lay no American city, but we were suddenly in Italy’s classic land. There were the minarets, towers, steeples, villas, cupolas and domes… 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?