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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 Model Detective

The Only True Account of the Fate of Paul Picra

by William O. Eaton

“Murder will out sometime, sure!” exclaimed Daniel Wonder to a few hearers, as he laid down a paper from which he had just been reading about a case of mysterious murder, the perpetrator of which had been discovered after years of ingenious and tortuous search. “I have many a time noticed it. It is according to the laws of nature, and must be so, if not right off, then by-and-by; if not [today], [tomorrow], next day, then a year, ten, fifty, perhaps a hundred years hence. The murder and the murderer are sure to come out. If I was on a plank alone with a man in the middle of the ocean, and was to murder him and sink him, with no ship in sight—I couldn’t feel safe! Sometime or other something would bring me out. If I didn’t tell of myself, asleep or awake, his bones would rise, or—”

“Or his sperrit?” suggested somebody.

“No; I don’t believe in spirits—but his bones, clothes, or the plank—or it might be somebody was looking at me from a ship out of sight, through a powerful spyglass, or perhaps from another plank, or perhaps happening to pass by overhead in a silk balloon, and see me do it—and so I should feel sure I was not safe until at last I was led out to be hung. You see there is always a chain of evidence between the murderer and murdered. It may be short or long. It may be broken into many separate links; but in time one man picks up one link here, another a link there, another another, and so on, until all the links are found and put together, and they are strong enough to hang the man.”

“It does seem so.” said one of the listeners, in a thoughtful awe.

“Seem so! It is so! I always know that murder will out, and have seen many singular cases of it. But the most singular case I ever heard of was the fate of Paul Picra, of… 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?