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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 Secret Cipher

A Detective’s Story

Obix:— Nvvy ne hzgfiiozb mrtsg zg 127 Uriv hgivvg. Mvw.

There it was, in italics, half way down the “personal” column of the Herald, conspicuous only for its most aggravating combination of letters and figures, the sole clue to the whereabouts of the game I had been after for over a week, scarcely resting, eating or sleeping in my anxiety to secure the reward offered in a heavy burglary case—and something else.

That “something else.” Ah! my heart sank within me as I flung aside the enigmatical puzzle before me, and leaned back in my chair, and gave myself up to the gloomy reveries of the past. Edna Dayton—how I loved her! How fair and beautiful as a summer’s idyl had been the weeks in which I had met her, had loved her, and had been told that my affection was returned! How well I remember the bitter parting—a hopeless one, it seemed to me—when I learned my fate from her father’s lips, and passed down the brown stone steps of the Dayton mansion, wondering if the inclination of moneyed men toward stone residences was caused not by the existence of a similar hard material in that part of the human anatomy known as the heart.

I was a poor man, he said, and the profession of a detective was a precarious one. His daughter loved me—he could not deny that—but she… 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?