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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

Select Story

The Secret Door

A Strange Story of the Sequel to a Crime

The police of Paris have recently stumbled across the sequel to a very remarkable tragedy which occurred over twenty years ago, and has remained until the present an impenetrable mystery. To bring all the facts of the case fully before the reader, it will be necessary to go back to a comparatively remote period.

At the beginning of the year 1852, a family named D’Eimer became the owners of the Vertneuve estate, on the Saone, between Chalon and Dijon. Chateau Vert, the residence, was a very large old mansion, situated on a rising ground on the right bank of a small tributary of the Saone. The locality was romantically beautiful, and the new tenants, who were wealthy, speedily resuscitated the gardens and transformed the decayed and deserted dwelling into a comfortable and attractive homestead.

The D’Eimer family consisted of Mons. D’Eimer, a gentleman of about fifty; Madame, a motherly lady of about the same age, and three daughters and one son—the latter a boy of fifteen, and the youngest of the family. Within three months of their settling at the chateau, the three daughters and the mother died of typhus fever.… 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?