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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 Double Elopement

How have you made division of yourself?
An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?”
—Twelfth Night

“My dear fellow, you really must assist me; hang it, man, you must not sacrifice the future happiness of your friend to a mere punctilio.”

“But an elopement, Frank?”

“Is now our only resource; since old Muggins’s unfortunate elevation, he has become so blown with pride and self-importance, that he is determined to bestow the hand of my own sweet little Lucy on no one under the rank of a nobleman, a prince, a grandee, or some such presumptuous absurdity.”

“But really Frank—”

He cut short my remonstrance abruptly, almost angrily. “I tell you my dear fellow, there’s no ‘but’ in the case. We were schoolfellows together, students together, we have been in fifty scrapes and fifty pleasures together; and, will you desert me at such a point as this? It is not for myself alone I plead; heaven knows the disappointment would be bitter enough, but I could endure that. But to see my poor Lucy fretting and pining, with failing hope and harsh words—and I fear treatment—of her parents, is too much. I cannot bear that; it drives me almost mad. Come, throw the rules of puritanical ceremoniousness overboard for once, and be natural. Your sister is with us heart and hand; and it is you who are able to make two loving ones happy or to crush their hopes forever, to save a fond and affectionate girl from a thraldom which is slowly destroying her, or to rivet her fetters tighter and break her heart.”

The quick working of his handsome features stamped the generousness of his emotion; and, carried away by his eloquence and the thronging memories of our long friendship, I at last reluctantly gave my consent to aid his enterprise; and with… 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?