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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

Trapping a Tartar

by Marion Powell

Mrs. Lascelles was the model of a jealous wife—she never went to bed till her husband was safe and sound in his room, and she invariably searched his pockets to see if they contained anything contraband. She was so very pretty that she might have been perfectly easy, for certainly few could approach our fair heroine in personal appearance. She had been married about seven years, and had done her best to annoy her husband in every possible shape, so far as the fair sex was concerned. In every other respect she was a treasure—she hated flirts, and boldly denounced them all, both male and female, as something worse than fools in intellect, and something still infinitely worse in morals.

Having brought her husband a good fortune, she felt that independence so unpleasant to husbands when a woman plants her back against her marriage certificate and defies her legal lord and master.

Lascelles, who was really very fond of his wife, was a lawyer in excellent practice and repute; his sole sorrow was that absurd suspicion, which destroyed his mental peace, and sometimes seriously interfered with his profession. This she had carried to such an extent that he had really contemplated advertising that no young or pretty clients would be attended to in consequence of the sensitiveness of his wife.

Their drives in the Bois de Bologne were the most amusing things in the world. When Madame Lascelles saw a carriage approaching which held any of the fair sex, she would appear to close her eyes all but a little corner, out of which she looked with all her soul. But time is insufficient to describe the numerous methods the fair Julie Lascelles had of plaguing her… 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?