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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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Max Shinburn

by Allan Pinkerton

Maximilian Shinburn, alias Mark Shinburn, alias Mark Baker, alias Zimmerman, with half a hundred other aliases, is a very brilliant and exceptional instance of a professional criminal having won considerable fame from a series of masterly bank and bond robberies, marvelous prison escapes, and the like, in America, and then crowning all by a final escape, sound and safely, to Belgium, where he has since lived an active, and, as far as can be learned, an honorable business life, being favored with luxury and the pleasantest of life’s surroundings.

He is now about forty years of age, and, whether born in America or elsewhere, is a German Jew, and has a fluent command of the English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian languages. One account has it that he was born in Europe, and received his superb education there, leaving his native country on account of some wild, boyish escapade, and coming to America when he was about eighteen years of age, proceeding to St. Louis, where he became very proficient in the locksmith’s trade; but finding this a slow way to secure the elegancies of life, turning the knowledge thus gained to criminal pursuits, and after being arrested, and while awaiting trial, effecting the liberation of himself and seventeen other prisoners.

Again, some of his old associates in crime state that he was born 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?