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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 Missing Will

by Rett Winwood

I was in the city, working busily away at my law-books, when the despatch came that Uncle Robert Collingwood was on his death-bed, and had asked to see me. Of course such a summons was not to be disregarded, so I straightway set about packing my carpet-bag, and perhaps ought to have dropped into it a few scalding tears, with the clean linen and box of paper collars that found their way there, but did not. I only set about the work quietly, and with so much attention that not a single needed article was forgotten.

Riding out in the cars, I had time for thought, but none for grief. Uncle Robert was an old man, very wealthy and very odd, and my nearest relative living; but he had seemed to utterly ignore my existence, for a few years back, and now I felt no more sorrow at the thought of his death, than at that of the merest stranger. In fact, he was a stranger, and as such I regarded him. He had asked for me, however, and I could not refuse to go to him.

There was no carriage waiting for me at the station, when I reached it at last, and I was obliged to find a hack. When I arrived at the house, a single glance was sufficient to tell me that all was over. A deathly stillness seemed to hover about the place, and a black streamer was fluttering from the door-knob. The servant who let me in, said that my uncle had died very early in the morning. Finding myself too late, I asked to be shown to a room where I could rest from the fatigue of the journey. The servant led the way up stairs, and we had hardly reached the landing, when a door opened, near at hand, and a figure flitted in, and paused where the sunbeams from the great oriel window that lighted the upper hall fell full and bright upon her. A figure scarcely of medium size it was, yet astounding in a certain sort of indescribable girlish grace, clad in a flowing robe… 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?