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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 Professor's Stratagem*

by Judge Clark

Herr Karl von Krummelhauser—the Professor, he was called—was an eccentric man of science. With the exception of a few students to whom he gave private lessons, he received no visitors, and had no associates.

His daughter Mary, it was universally agreed, was an angel, and a very arch one at that. I am not going to tell you how pretty she was: but just do your best to fancy the utmost perfection of incipient womanhood, and, if you are blessed with a fair share of the poetic element, you may reach some faint conception of the truth.

Among the Professor’s pupils were my friend Max Oppenheim and myself—at least, I was Max’s friend; I believe he was nobody’s, though I then thought differently. I fell dead in love with Mary, and made Max my confidant, and finally “spoke” to her father.

The Professor heard my proposal with a serious look.

“Have you the means to support a wife?” he inquired.

My resources, I was obliged to confess, were mainly prospective and wholly contingent.

“I am already old,” he continued, “and the small annuity which barely suffices, with such additions as I am able to make to it, for present needs, will end with my life. My daughter xxx[will inherit]xxxxxxxxx[should] only be given to such a union as will render her future assured. However, I will defer my decision. Mary is yet too young to marry. But if, at the end of two years, you shall be in a position to warrant a renewal of your offer, and shall not have changed your mind, I will give you an answer; till then, let the subject be dismissed."

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?