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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 Letter That Never Came

by C. H. Harlow

In July, 1879, I was ordered to duty on board the United States ship Alert, bound for the China station, with orders to visit the South Pacific islands en route. We left San Francisco on the 3d of August, and as I recall the first part of the voyage out, we had strong favorable winds that carried us to the line, a distance of over two thousand miles, in sixteen days, a very fair average for a small steam corvette under sail alone. We slipped through the Doldrum regions at the rate of a 100 miles a day, and took up the southeast trades without being conscious of having lost the northeast. The morning watch would trim the sails, steady taut the braces, and “sweat home” the sheets, an hour would be devoted to routine drills, and then the balance of the day would be given up to delicious idling, the officers with pipes and books, and the men with clothing and ditty boxes. A cooling breeze swept through the flattened wind sails; the royals and all-port stern sails gave her a comfortable list, and day after day rolled over and under us until the page of the nautical almanac showed that one whole month had been crossed off. Then came a few days of tiresome calm. We were in latitude 24° S., longitude 128° W. If you will take the trouble to look on a map of the South Pacific Ocean at about that latitude and longitude, you will find a tiny speck, not larger than that made by a needle point, indicating an island. There are hundreds of such specks in the Pacific Ocean, many of them without names, and all of more or less uncertain location. This one, however, bears the name of Elizabeth or Henderson Island. I have never been able to… 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?