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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

Pages from

The Diary of a Philadelphia Lawyer

No. IV.

The Unnatural Prosecution

Turning her mother’s pains and benefits

To laughter and contempt—that she may feel

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

Shakespeare.

Among the various occupations of man, there are none in which the practitioner is so much exposed to the extremes of human passion and human weakness, as in those which have been entitled consensus publici—the learned professions.

In periods of mental distress, when the anguished spirit wrestles with the demon of the world, and trembling under its load of conscious guilt—

That rings

In one dark, damning moment, crimes of years,

And screaming like a vulture in his ears,

Tells one by one, his thoughts and deeds of shame—

and the prospect of endless beatific existence in accepted and consecrated faith, sinks beneath the weight of its own immortal nature—when the soul shudders at its suspended condition, and even hope seems paralyzed, and fiercest terror strikes the alarum of everlasting death—when the proud spirit plumes its wing in anticipation of the flight that is to land it in its last, eternal home— ’tis then the timed and affrighted mortal calls to his side the minister of heaven’s pledges, and in the society of the clergyman, seeks a consolation and relief by exposing… 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?