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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

The Counterfeiters

“The thing can be done easy enough!”

“I doubt it!”

“What! you are not afraid?”

The last question was uttered in a tone of apparent surprise, but had a tinge of sarcasm in it.

“No, not afraid!” was the somewhat angry reply, “but I look at all the chances, and want to see before I leap.”

“That is right!”

“I have always found it advisable[,]” the speaker continued, “to look at an enterprise in all its bearings before going into it.”

The appearance of the speaker indicated a man slow in his resolutions, but persistent in carrying them out when once he had formed them. He had a piercing black eye, a bronzed face, and threads of silver [string] in and out of his black hair. The face was heavy and impassive, but the thick sensual lips and habitual sneer, evinced a disposition rarely influenced by other than evil passions.

His companion was a much younger man, but if the face be an index of the heart, was swayed by impulses differing but little from those of his friend. There was about his looks a dash of recklessness not be seen upon the other, but even an ordinary observer would not have given him credit for the shrewd sagacity—the fixed purpose and iron will that distinguished his friend.

They were seated in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hotel, and were discussing a deed of lawlessness, which, if matured and carried out as they proposed, would have set the city wild with excitement. They were strangers, evidently, but it did not need the purport of their low-… 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?