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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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[Written for The Flag of our Union]

Branch Bridge’s Ghost

by Arthur L. Meserve

"There, Uncle Ben, how are you going to get round that?” I said, in a half-joking, half-triumphant tone, as I laid down a paper in which I had been reading aloud a well-authenticated ghost story. What the paper stated could be vouched for by a half score of respectable citizens, who the editor declared were ready and eager to give their oaths to what they had seen with their eyes and heard with their ears.

Uncle Ben, to whom I had addressed the question, was an old man, one of the first settles of our part of the country; and, unlike a great many other old men, he took a great interest in what was going on in the world; and now that his eyesight had in a measure failed him, he was dependent upon others to read to him the news, and for his edification I had read the current ghost story that was then going the rounds of newspaperdom, and then demanded his opinion on the subject, as I have already chronicled.

“There is a way to get round everything of that sort, if you only go the right way to work, and aint afraid of seeing anything, be it in the flesh or not. A man sometimes sees that which he is afraid he shall, even with his eyes shut. I don’t believe that there was ever one of these stories but what could be sifted to the bottom and found that natural causes had to do with it. In my young days, just after I settled here, we had a ghost that frightened half of the people out of their wits; but I unraveled the mystery after awhile, when it had got so that nobody dared to cross the bridge after dark, for fear of seeing or hearing something from the other world.”

“Was the bridge thought to be haunted?”

“Yes. Branch Bridge; and people had seen and heard things that they could not account for, and it was not to be wondered at. Strange… 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?