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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 Detective's Story

[The following, which we translate from the French, appears in a little volume before us, entitled “Annals of the Empire and Restoration,” published at Brussels in 1839:]

A police agent should never be a man who has a conscientious regard for truth. Fouche compared those honest men of the force, but which the public insist on calling us spies, to the stage-coach which must make its regular trips, full or empty. A detective should make his report every day, in order that he may receive his pay, and show his fidelity and zeal; if he knows nothing he must invent a story of some kind, and if, perhaps, he does know something, he should seek in every way to amplify the details, and magnify the importance of the whole affair. The police are very good for the detection of counterfeiters, murderers and other violators of the civil law, but when they dabble in political matters, they often commit as many blunders as they gain successes. The secret political police, however, has its ramifications throughout the country, and its agents in all classes of society.—If a Frenchman, or for the matter of that, a European of almost any nation, gets up a conspiracy against the government, and imparts his ideas to even a few particular friends, it would be truly extraordinary if among his confederates there was not at least one particular friend of the minister or chief of police. Under the Empire this class was never more effective, although it then employed the fewest agents, and yet each day Fouche, the minister of police, had two or three baskets full of reports which he never read.

Of all the governments that have fallen to the lot of France decidedly the most ridiculous was the Directory. The members, with one or two exceptions, believed in the police as they… 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?