The News

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

Atlantic Mail—First Class

As naturally as a steel needle flies to a magnet so have I felt always ready to hurry to the aid of a lady in distress. I do not say it vauntingly, nor put it forward as a virtue, for the act has generally been involuntary; and so it was one day last year, when, having seen my small quantity of personal luggage on board the great screw-liner lying at the wharf getting up her steam, ready for her race across the Atlantic, I was loafing about, watching with considerable amusement the arrival of passengers, for the most part excited, worried, and the prey of porters and cabmen, who seem to be troubled with no more perfections in Liverpool than in the metropolis. A lighted cigar was between my lips, and I was trying to enjoy it—for, judging from old experience of my sensations in a rough sea, I did not anticipate much comfort for the next two or three days at the least—when a very ordinary-looking man, evidently a commercial traveler for a cutting house, walked up and asked me for a light, staring at me the while in so offensive a manner that, as I handed my cigar, I glanced down at his left hand to see that it was not meddling with my watch-chain.

“Looks like a commercial, but may be a pick-pocket,” I said—mentally, of course—while he puffed at his cigar, putting mine out in the process.

“Going across?” he said, abruptly, and, to use what would probably have been his expression, taking stock of me the while.

“Sir?”

“Going across the pond—Helvellyn?” he said again, coolly, and nodding his head toward the great steaming and snorting vessel.

“My cigar—thanks!” I said, in a tone meant to be perfectly Belgravian in its hauteur, as I turned aside; for I had met the appeal of a pair of dark eyes—a… 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?