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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 Baby’s Shoe

A Literally True Tale of Patagonia

by Walter Clarence

I presume most of my readers have heard of Patagonia, and the Straits of Magellan; but few, very few persons have really seen that coast, and land of utter desolation. Even among those “who go down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters,” there are comparatively very few who know more regarding this far southern locality than that Cape Horn is situated at its southern extremity, and that it is a disagreeable spot for navigators and mariners to pass in consequence of the stormy weather which prevails over the greatest portion of the year, and the intense cold that is experienced, except on rare occasions, even during the summer season. Masters of vessels usually give Cape Horn a wide birth—steering far to the southward, where the wind is generally more steady, and where they are not so liable to be caught by heavy squalls off the highlands. It is but seldom that those who “double Cape Horn,” as it is termed in nautical parlance, even sight the curved summit of the lofty rocks off Terra del Fuego, whence the appellation of Cape Horn is derived, and those see it only at a distance. At one period it was thought that ships bound to the Pacific Ocean would save time, and avoid tempestuous weather and rough seas, by going through the narrow straits of Magellan, and I believe some few ships did take this course; but it was soon discovered that the navigation through the straits was tedious and fraught with numerous perils, on account of the fogs and variable currents which therein prevail, and the practice was discontinued, and of late years, so much of the commerce between the Atlantic and Pacific is carried on by means of steamships, aided by the railroad across the Isthmus of Darien, that the voyages around the cape are much less frequently undertaken than they… 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?