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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 Burglar-Proof Man

A Detective’s Story

I don’t suppose you feel much interest in burglars, nor are their habits a very choice theme in polite literature; but then that occurrence at Glen Spring was really an extraordinary affair. I was on the police force at the time and knew Calico Charley well. His father was one of the best machinists in the country, and he took more pains to make a man of his boy than the fellow deserved. The old man had a little machine shop and had the boy Charley with him—a bright, smart chap he was then. When he was twenty-one he got to be pretty lively about town, for the old man had saved up a handsome property and let Charley have more money than was good for him. Then they got up a new safe lock, and it made a big stir, and I believe they went into that sort of thing pretty heavy. Any way Charley went over with the lock to the first world’s fair in London. There he got tipped up. I never heard exactly how it was. They put up a wicked job on him, and got him mixed up with a pretty bad London “mob.” The story that we heard was that he picked a safe lock for a party that shouldn’t have been picked. Any way, he got in with the wrong crowd and they wouldn’t let go of him. He stayed over there about five years and got to be a regular first-class sneak, and worked a half a dozen jobs in the most scientific manner. We got word from Scotland Yard that he was coming back, and I dropped in at the old man’s place to try to find out something. Old Calcott (that was his name) had got rich. What with his bank lock and his other inventions, his mean way of living, and his luck in buying some down town property before people had an idea how big the city was going to be, he’d come to be a regular nabob. I couldn’t get a word out of him about his boy. He said he’d given him up, and was going to retire from business. Money must have come pretty fast then to the old fellow. He… 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?