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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 Romance of Cracker's Neck

by Col. George W. Symonds

That turbulent and tortuous stream the Little Sandy river coils itself completely around a rocky plateau of about 10,000 acres area, in the western corner of Elliott County, Kentucky, the waters of the river being divided by a narrow strip of crumbled cliff. From time immemorial this peninsula has born the euphonious name of “Cracker’s Neck.” It is a wild and gloomy spot, if you follow the boundaries of the plateau and view it from the opposite bank of the river. Walled in on all sides by frowning cliffs, rising nearly perpendicular to the height of 800 feet, their upper edge fringed by a heavy growth of stunted firs and laurel bushes, it certainly has a forbidding look. If you have the curiosity to explore the plateau and climb the summit of the crumbling cliff at the point of jointure with the mainland, the aspect changes. Ten years ago there was a thick growth of heavy timber on the “neck,” but it has all been cleared away, and a vista of fertile fields and newly fenced plantations sweep away on all sides to the cliff edges, which are still bordered by the laurel and fir growth. Evidences of civilization in the way of comfortable houses and stables and sheep flocks cropping the succulent herbage are seen on every band. The country surrounding this plateau is rocky and sterile and the fertile neck rises up like an oasis in the mountain desert. It instinctively strikes the imaginative beholder as a fine spot for romance, and the “Romance of Cracker’s Neck” I now intend to tell.

Immediately after the close of the late war a man named Peter J. Livingstone, who had commanded a regiment of guerrillas on the confederate side, purchased the neck for a nominal sum, cleared away the timber, laid off fields, built roads and erected houses and opened a store just on the verge of the crumbling cliff and graded a road to… 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?