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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 Detective’s Story

by Geo. Melnotte Grummond

One dark and stormy night in November, 1874, when the rain was beating a dismal tattoo on the window pane, and the wind was howling and shrieking around the gables of the neighboring houses in a lonesome accompaniment to the splashing of the water in the gutters, swelled by the fast-falling rain, I sat in my cozy little office, where the ruddy fire-light cast a comfortable contrast to the darkness without, where the mellow light from a student’s lamp barely lit up the space outside the shadow of the shade upon it, and utterly failed to dispel the darkness and ghostly sombreness that clung to the piles of old books, manuscripts, old papers, ancient pictures, and innumerable other “old things” with histories and tales attached to them; making their dim, dull outlines take upon themselves the light and glory of romance.

On the opposite side of my desk sat a life-long friend, Tom O’Hara. We had been schoolboys together, mates at college; and the firmest of friends in after years. Tom was a detective in the City of New York and one of the shrewdest men on the force, and having run down to Riverside on private business, had spent his leisure time with me. And on this evening, just mentioned, we were talking over the old scenes which had taken place long ago in our schooldays, and many were the laughs our pranks in younger days brought up. So vivid was memory that I almost felt myself again grasping the ball-bat or skimming over the glassy ice as we had often done;… 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?