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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

Called to Account.

A Detective’s Story.

Some years ago, when I was quite a young man, I was sent down to Evan’s Corners, about a big robbery that had occurred, and while I was there, working the thing up, my attention was attracted by a pretty girl I used to see at the hotel where I stopped. Nobody could help noticing her, she was such a beauty. Her hair and eyes were very dark, but her skin was as fair as a lily, with just a dash of red that came and went in her cheeks. Her form was slender, but well rounded, and her hand was as white and finely formed as any lady’s in the land. Her name was Rose Wynne, and of course she had plenty of admirers, but she coquetted with them all. However there were two who were a long way ahead of the others. I used to wonder which she liked the best, but I could never guess, for while she smiled sweetly on one, she would fling a merry word at the other, and so on. Both young men were good looking—one fair, the other dark—and both were carpenters. One was called Andrew Davis, and the other Mark Sheldon.

Sheldon was a jealous fellow, and showed it. Davis was jealous, too, but didn’t show it so plain. Sheldon was always in a quarrel with her. Davis, I fancied, was angry enough at her coquetteries sometimes to eat her, but he never let on.

Rose Wynne knew I was a detective, and had a sort of awe and curiosity about me. Many a yarn I told her, some true, some not. It was so pretty to see her big eyes kindle and grow bigger.

I used to joke her sometimes and try and discover which she liked best, Davis or Sheldon. But she would never tell me.

“See here, Rose,” I said to her one day when she had been playing those two chaps… 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?