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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

Lou Lispenard’s Escape

by Caroline Conrad

Ren Clifford sat with head drooped and an expression of perplexed thought upon his countenance, not that he doubted her, but there were so many things about it all that he could not understand. There was such a tangle somehow, and daylight nowhere, that he could discover. He had grown thin with fasting, for he could not eat, and haggard with anxiety, for he loved with all the energies of his soul the pretty girlish girl whom all the world was condemning now, and whose slender loveliness damp prison walls were enclosing in what certainly threatened to be a relentless embrace. If Lou would only be reasonable herself, but there was just the trouble; the girl was icy as an Artic berg and impenetrable as granite.

Ren Clifford had been all over the ground that was his to go over, too thoroughly to misunderstand the position. Unless something new turned up, Lou was lost most likely. His face blanched of the little fleshy hue it had, and he clenched his hand impotently.

“If she would only let me help her,” he groaned.

The girl he loved—the girl who was to have been his wife in a few weeks—Death! It was too horrible.

Someone rapped lightly upon his door, and then the bolt shot back, and Cresswell, the lawyer friend he had sent for, came in.

“Thank God you have come!” the young man exclaimed, springing to meet him. “I should have gone for you myself, but I couldn’t go far away from her. Old friend, save her!” He broke down with a piteous cry, covering his face with his hands.

Only a moment. Lawyer Cresswell had not time to grow impatient, scarcely to feel pitiful. Ren Clifford had held haggard, haunted vigils of late, his nerves were jarred with sleeplessness and unstrung with horror; and the sight of his friend had touched him. But he rallied at once, dropped the momentary weakness with his hands from his face, and… 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?