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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

Cases of Mistaken Identity

A gentleman who lives in Brooklyn has had for years a “double” who has given him much trouble. He never saw his “double,” and his “double,” so far as he himself knows, has never seen him. But there is a continual game of cross-purposes. Calling the original A, he finds that B has been mistaken for him time and again, and vice versa – as, for example, when A was reproached by a lady friend for having passed her without recognition, although she had bowed to him and spoken his name, he was able to satisfy her that at that particular hour of that particular day, instead of being in New York, he was in Philadelphia.

A similar story is told by an English writer, in a humorous vein, in one of the October periodicals. He says:

My name is Withers – Richard Withers, of Jermyn Street, London, ostensibly an importer. I am not Blobbs of Wadham; that is what I wish to be clearly understood. In the year eighteen hundred and fifty, or thereabouts, the great firm of Nature and Company, falling short, I suppose, in their original material, issued a couple of duplicates – fac-similies – and I had the misfortune to be one of them. We were not twins: there was no mystic sympathy of being between us to whisper to each other, “Thou hast a double;” nothing in the slightest degree to suggest… 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?