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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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Re-United

By J. Walter Amerman

Love will interpose
Its tiny touch, and cause the stern explosion
To burst, when the deviser’s least aware- Scorr

"Look!" Anson Kent pointed westward. “The shifting light resting upon those pine sentinels deep-rooted in the precipitous ledges of the neighboring hills resembles an arrowy gleam of sunshine quivering about the edges of a black thunder cloud. I am in a fair way to become an enthusiastic lover of nature if we recreate among the Catskills much longer.”

It was a romantic prospect—long extensive ranges environing in a small country village nestled at their feet, dark forests far beyond rising into the blue sky, a tapering church spire here and there through the valley, orchards and fields of rustling grain—so thought that motionless group of young men, some standing in the open doorway of the Elliott farm house, others knee-deep in the fragrant clover a few steps off. No thoughts went flitting back, then, to wearisome, brief and bulky ledger, or the working up of tedious cases in heated city courts; for the sweet scent of lilac, rose and new mown hay was the breath of freedom to those four who felt like languishing prisoners after long confinement, or sportive school children let out to play.

We had just returned from a piscatorial excursion through the Stoney Clove woods, bearing from the brawling trout streams where our lines had dropped that summer afternoon, a string of spotted beauties as prized trophies of our success, and now were silently watching the bright sunset’s glow as it slowly crept up ridge after ridge of the shadowy mountains, then blazed on a far off steeple’s mute bell, and vanished.

“I tell you, Anson, as I feel now it is impossible to electrify me with boyish rhapsodies over such execrable scenery as this, and expect a rapturous appreciation of… 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?