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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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[From the London "Once a Week."]

My Adventure at the Assizes

It is now about fifteen years since I was compelled to attend the assizes at our county town as a junior member of a highly respectable legal firm. Knowing that there would be several important causes, besides our own, and two or three cases on the criminal side, which excited much public attention, that thus the small county town would be overwhelmed with visitors, I took the precaution of writing—the night before my journey—to secure beds for myself and clerk at the principal inn, where I was, of course, well known.

The next day I took my journey, arriving at my destination early in the day. I found, as I had expected, the town crowded with people; and, on going into the hotel, the landlord informed me that he had received my letter, but that to retain a bed-room for me in his house had been absolutely impossible, the hotel being filled to overflowing by other persons who had bespoken rooms before me. He had provided one small bed-room in a respectable public house, which would suit my clerk; but as to myself, if I would confide my sleeping arrangements to his care, he would ensure me a handsome apartment and comfortable bed-room out of the house, and would convey me there in one of his carriages.

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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?