The News

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

Pen-Knife Blade

A Leaf from a Surgeon's Diary

by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.

Some very strange and curious things happen in this world; and he who would deal in the marvelous, need not go out from the field of facts. “Truth is stranger than fiction,” is an old and common saying, though I could never see much sense in it, since all proper fiction is but the reflex of truth. In fact, they go hand in hand, and one is just as strange as the other. The man who originated the saying had probably found some truth which was so strange, that he feared people would hesitate to believe it, so he claimed that the strangest kind of stories were the true ones. Now, I have a story to tell, which I am sure will be held by the reader as both strange and curious; and such, in fact, it is; and it is true—every word of it. Concerning names and dates, I must be a little reticent, wherefore you will see when you read what I have to tell.

One cold, blustering evening in mid winter, I was seated before my cheerful fire, with my book in my hand—a medical magazine—engaged in reading an account of a curious operation which had lately been performed by Valentine Mott. I had come to an uncut page, and was looking for my paper-cutter, when my wife, who sat at the opposite side of the stand, remarked to me that Harriet Roberts had been to see her that afternoon, and that she wished to come and work in our family.

“Harriet Roberts wants to work in our family!” I cried, with much astonishment.

I thought my wife must be mistaken; but… 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?