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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 Major’s Wife

CHAPTER I.

Major Mellish is sitting is his bachelor lodgings in Duke street in no enviable state of mind. After ten years’ hard and perilous service in India, during which he had almost miraculously passed safely through some of the most dangerous work of the great mutiny of 1856, he had obtained a twelve months’ leave of absence on urgent private affairs, and is now waiting the arrival of a detective, whom he has employed to discover the whereabouts of one who was, and who is even still very dear to him.

When his regiment lay at country quarters shortly before its hurried departure from England for India, the Major, then only a Lieutenant, had fallen deeply in love with a charming girl, who, though beneath him in the social scale, was in every other respect, worthy of becoming any honest man’s wife; for, although now reduced to the sad necessity of occupying a situation behind the counter of a Manchester mercer, Ellen Willmore had been well brought up and well educated.

The death of her only surviving parent had left her with a limited income, and the intemperate extravagance and gambling propensities of an elder brother soon afterward stripped her of every farthing of it. Their father had bequeathed to them an equal share in the little property of which he had died possessed; but unluckily the will was so loosely worded that no legal restriction prevented Ellen from parting with the half of her two thousand pounds of which it consisted; and after the reckless spendthrift had wasted his own moiety, his sister had not sufficient strength of mind to refuse his mingled menaces and… 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?