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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 Village Thief

The people of the village of M— were alarmed. They could scarcely retire at night without being robbed. Stores, houses and families were pilfered, but who performed the nefarious deed or deeds could not be discovered. Guns and other warlike weapons were in demand; but these were ineffectual, for the guilty party still exercised his vocation with impunity. Police had been placed upon his track, but their efforts to discover him were unsuccessful; no clue to the appearance of the thief could be obtained from his victims; all of the latter agreed that they were plundered, not by an established band, but by one individual. Some said that immediately before they were robbed, they had noticed “a large fierce-looking fellow” prowling around their premises; others affirmed that the guilty party was “a small, fine-looking man” and, lastly, there were a few superstitious ones who declared that the robber was not a man, but the emissary of a certain individual supposed to govern the warm regions. With these conflicting reports, it would puzzle the last-named gentleman himself to discover the thief. It was for these reasons that the villagers were alarmed.

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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?