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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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The Intriguante

A Detective’s Experience

In a low, weather beaten brick mansion far down on Music street resides an old woman whose strange history is interwoven with the details of fearful crime. It is not many years since she was famous in the locality where she resides as an intriguante. No one rightly knew her origin. Ever since I have known her—and it has been many years now—she has been old and savage in look and action. Her long unkempt hair hangs around a face haggard and wrinkled with age. Crime has put its seal upon the strange weird face, and the fierce, black eyes have an intense glow which evinces habitual ill will.

“She was concerned,” said Mr. F., “a number of years ago in the abduction of a beautiful country girl who came to this city with her parents. Mr. I. and myself were employed to ferret the matter out, and bring, if possible, the guilty parties to punishment.

An account of the transaction was published in the Picayune of that day, and there are persons in the city who will yet remember the circumstance. The victim was a beautiful young girl, scarcely twenty, and for the short period she moved in society, reigned a belle. By some means she became acquainted with a young man, whose addresses were… 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?