Panek and Bendel-Simso send three-hundered-fifty page manuscript to editor
By Dave Robertson
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (Sherlock Holmes) A Case of Identity, 1892
Much sleuthing hath transpired in the English Department of McDaniel College. Dr. LeRoy Panek and Dr. Mary Bendel-Simso have compiled an anthology with the working title, The First Chapter: An Anthology of American Detective Fiction.
Able to finally unwind after spending over a year on the project, Panek and Bendel-Simso sent the 350 page manuscript to the editors October 3. The anthology contains short detective works ranging from Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) to the first printing of Sherlock Holmes in U.S. papers (1891), with a four-page introduction to each section.
The royalties from this project will be donated to the Helen C. Hency Fund, in the college’s endowment, for the benefit and uplift of the English Department. Panek believed that this is the first time in school history that royalties of a faculty member’s written work have been assigned to the college.
After Panek’s last book, Origins of the American Detective Story, he initially wanted to include “the firsts” from each subclass within the mystery genre, maybe a collection of 8 or 10 longer stories by well-known authors.
“I put that idea on the backburner because this [anthology] is more historically significant,” said Panek.
He approached Bendel-Simso with the idea and asked for her involvement in researching websites, scanning materials, looking for general information on small and large-scale newspaper databases, and proofreading Panek’s transcriptions.
He describes this aspect of research as “incredibly boring, unskilled laborious scholarship but if you don’t do it, you end up with no results.”
A mystery and American Literature aficionado, Bendel-Simso says she was always doing what she called the “Agatha Christie of the week” in school. This was a perfect pairing, in spite of the work overlapping with the classes she currently teaches—Panek, on the other hand, is on sabbatical this semester.
Panek flatly stated, “How do you say in your language…We came across a ‘shitload,’ a plethora, a lot” of detective fiction by relatively obscure authors that had their works published in newspapers. However, these papers bought authorial rights to the works and syndicated them. Copyright laws were not followed, at least in America, until the 1890s.
“I found pretty good short stories people have forgotten for a long time,” Panek said.
Many of the works are anonymous, making it difficult to determine which ones came first. Few well-known journalists wrote detective stories; series detectives often received recognition, but many newspapers pirated the works, especially foreign authors.
“So much swiping went on,” said Bendel-Simso. “It seems kind of ironic we are publishing all of them again.”
Most early detective fiction, before the explosion of the genre by Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was originally published in newspapers—a more accessible means of publication to the general population.
“They had a different concept of newspapers then,” says Bendel-Simso, pulling out a scanned copy of a paper containing “Vidocq, or the Charcoal Burner of France.”
These stories appeared beneath another creative writing piece—a daily or weekly poem, or some other comparable creation.
Though this initial compilation includes only 20 works, Panek and Bendel-Simso have found roughly 200. Instead of creating multiple volumes, they are applying for a grant to help with a website entitled the “Westminster Online Detective Stories.” Through this public site, Panek hopes to see scholars find more meaningful conclusions about these relatively obscure works.
If you are interested in reading detective shorts in their original context, the online catalogue of the Hoover Library contains a variety of newspaper databases.