The News

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

Sharp Detective Work

The Story of a Government Detective

by James Bagley

One day last winter I was sitting in the small waiting-room of the West Shore ferry-house at New York, looking through the dingy panes of glass at the icy river in hopes that the boat would come some time. I was in a hurry to cross to the Jersey shore and was impatient at the delay. The ferrymaster, a kindly old man with gray whiskers and a ruddy, smiling face, had told me that the boat would leave at 3 o’clock, and now, looking at my watch, I found that the hands marked quarter past three. Would the boat ever come? I had an engagement at Weehawken at 4 o’clock, and did not want to miss it. I saw the ice crush and crackle as the pieces were jammed against each other by the moving water, and the snow drip from the beams of the bridge and make little rivulets in the furrows of the much-worn planks, but I saw no boat. Just as visions of the little steamer lying wedged in the ice or sinking beneath the blow of some heavier vessel rose before me, I saw the object of my anxiety poke her blunt nose around the pier head and come throbbing into the slip. A deep voice behind me exclaimed, “It’s time.” Another impatient traveler, I thought, and then something familiar in the voice caused me to turn around. I was not mistaken. The owner of the voice was an old friend of mine—John Sullivan De Belle, United States Secret Service officer. I reached out my hand to him cordially—we had not met in ever so long—and together we entered the boat. In answer to my inquiries, he said he was crossing the river on “business.” With natural curiosity I wanted to know what the “business” was.

“Business for the Government” (noncommittal).

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?