Unreliable narrator or not, how fabulous is Maud West, Lady Detective? I really enjoyed this book but I did find it a little bit choppy in the way facts were delivered as part of the narrative. overall, fascinating.

I think that the students in our school library need to hear lots of diverse voices and read stories and lives of many different kinds of people and experiences. When I inherited the library it was an incredibly sanitised space with only 'school readers' and project books on 'the railways' etc. Buying in books that will appeal to the whole range of our readers with diverse voices, eclectic and fascinating subject matter, and topics that will intrigue and fascinate them was incredibly important to me.
This is a book that I think our senior readers will enjoy very much indeed - not just because it's well written with an arresting voice that will really keep them reading and about a fascinating topic - but it's also a book that doesn't feel worthy or improving, it doesn't scream 'school library and treats them like young reading adults who have the right to explore a range of modern diverse reads that will grip and intrigue them and ensure that reading isn't something that they are just forced to do for their English project - this was a solid ten out of ten for me and I'm hoping that our students are as gripped and caught up in it as I was. It was one that I stayed up far too late reading and one that I'll be recommending to the staff as well as our senior students - thank you so much for the chance to read and review; I really loved it and can't wait to discuss it with some of our seniors once they've read it too!

A real-life Agatha Christie? Say no more. I love this book and Susannah Stapleton writes with such enthusiasm and passion. I felt so absorbed in this story and couldn't believe I hadn't heard of Maud West before. This is a true story of a forgotten woman from history and she is brought to life in vivid colour by Susannah Stapleton.

Many thanks to both NetGalley and to Pan Macmillan for letting me see an advance reader's copy of this excellent biography.

When I was first sent this book to review, I could not open it. The publisher very quickly rectified this and sent me another version. However, it was still difficult to read due to layout problems, and so the publisher persevered and sent me another. I am so glad that they did this, because I really enjoyed this read.

At first, I thought it read like a novel and I did wonder where it was going. But once I remembered that it was a biography (I'd forgotten as some time had lapsed between my original request and receiving a readable version), all was well again.

Susannah Stapleton has carried out a most thorough investigation into this lady's life with dogged determination. I would have given a 5th star had it not occasionally gone off on a tangent, but I appreciate that there are readers who appreciate this extra colour.

It's a long read, but very interesting and informative. I also liked the excerpts written by the subject herself.

A brilliant story of one of the most engaging characters from history, disgracefully overlooked. The narrative feels like it is blending fact and fiction so the story nips along and the e-book was illustrated well. Superb book.

Maud West - sleuthing for the society set since 1905. This is her story - an engaging, enthralling and completely mesmerising account of her life and times. We also follow the writer as she researches her subject in meticulous detail. Fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable. Lovers of vintage crime of any kind should delight in this.

To all the lovers of novels from the golden age of crime, readers of Dorothy Sayers' and Agatha Christie's novels, I recommend the story of Maud West - The London's Lady Detective. Her life was full of remarkable stories of sleuthing, daring escapes and car chases (as well as not so glamorous shadowing), but the most remarkable story was that of Maud West herself. This is painstakingly researched by Susannah Stapleton and is the most interesting piece of detective work. It starts like every good crime novel, with a single clue, and then the story follows our author/narrator, as she discovers, bit by bit, clue after clue, Maud's secrets. Some of it is guesswork, some of it meticulous research, and there are red herrings and sudden discoveries like in every good novel. It is not only a fascinating read, but also a rare glimpse into a life of a businesswoman from the early 20th century.

I enjoyed this book which has been written by Ms Stapleton as a search for the truth about a "lady detective" in London in the early part of the twentieth century. The book is part biography, part social history and a large part the author's research methods to follow up little snippets which appear in various newspapers and magazines. I liked all the parts as they equally made the story drive forward. It is hard at times, to remember that this is real and Maud existed - although maybe not quite as the character she created for herself, with her tales of daring and dastardly deeds.

The author is an excellent storyteller and captures the era very well - she also captures the dead ends and twisted alleyways of historical research which I found quite fascinating. Lots of Maud's stories were fiction but she still lived an exciting life when women were subjugated and fighting for the vote and some sort of freedom from fathers and husbands.

Recommended if you like "Golden Age" fiction and tales of historical research.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Combining the charm of a classic mystery novel with the diligent research and careful analysis of a biography, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a rich and compelling story about secrets and lies in the golden age of crime.

A lover of golden age mystery novels herself, Susannah Stapleton is curled up on a winter’s night reading about Glady’s Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley when a thought strikes her – were there any real lady detectives in the golden age of crime? The resulting internet search brings up a Miss Maud West “London’s only Lady detective”, and starts Stapelton off on a journey filled with more red herrings and secret histories than even Agatha Christie might find plausible!

Without giving away too many of the details of Maud’s life, the unravelling of which is part of the joy of reading Stapleton’s painstakingly researched book, Maud West was a fascinating personality. Shamelessly self-publicising (it quickly becomes apparent that she is not, in fact, London’s sole Lady Detective at all), Maud sells her tales of derring-do to readers across the world, inventing numerous backstories and delighting thrill-seekers with her stories of foiled robberies, attempted kidnappings and dangerous continental drug gangs. But, as Stapleton digs deeper, ever questioning the truth behind Maud’s own account of herself, another story begins to emerge. Possibly less glamourous – and without a sinister blackmailer in sight – but no less compelling and, if anything, even more fantastical.

Interspersing her chapters with some of Maud’s delightful accounts of her endeavours, Stapelton has written an immensely readable blend of biography, social history and real-life mystery. I was fascinated to learn about the roles that private detectives played in the early part of the twentieth century, and encouraged by the initiative that so many early female pioneers took to advance their careers, such as the creation of the all-female ‘Efficiency Club’ to provide networking and advancement opportunities.

The book is also a compelling account of the difficulties of biographical research, especially when the subject is a little more ordinary than the royals or the political influencers that usually get this sort of treatment – and when they don’t necessarily want the facts of their life to be discovered. Although not able to fill all of the gaps, Stapelton is nonetheless able to craft together the essence of Maud’s fascinating life, pulling together the various traces that this enthralling woman left behind.

Doggedly researched and deliciously entertaining, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective, is a testament to the life of a forgotten pioneer who forged both an enduring personal life and a successful career in an era when women’s options were limited. Combining biography, mystery, and social history, this is one piece of literary sleuthing that golden age fans won’t want to miss this summer.

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective, by Susannah Stapleton and published by Picador, is subtitled ‘Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime‘. With a title like that I thought it sounded just the sort of book I would like – and I did.

It is so intriguing – was Maud West really who she said she was? Susannah Stapleton discovered that she really did exist and was indeed a private investigator with her own detective agency, based in London in the early part of the twentieth century, from 1905 onwards. The book gives plenty of extracts from Maud West’s own accounts of her investigations under Golden Age crime fiction titles such as The Lady Vanishes, The Body in the Library, and They Do It With Mirrors, for example. But these accounts had me wondering just what was the truth and what was fiction. They are so incredible! Maud was truly an amazing person – a master of disguise, equally able to pass herself off as a man, or a fortune teller, or a parlour maid, and skilled with a revolver, able to face down blackmailers. There are photographs of Maud – at work in her office and in a number of disguises. And it was not just in Britain – she worked all over the place including New York, Cape Town, Brazil, and Jakarta.

But what makes the book so good, and what kept me glued to the pages are the details of how Susannah Stapleton went about her research, included within the main narrative of her book. I haven’t come across this before – usually an author lists the sources used at the end – and there is just such a list (a very long and comprehensive list) at the end of this book. I was more intrigued by Stapleton’s own methods of research into finding out about Maud than I was by Maud herself.

I also loved all the details of the changing society in which Maud lived – the role of women in the struggle for equality, details of the living and working conditions and of the crimes that real life private detectives investigated – divorces, missing persons, adultery and theft.

It more than lived up to my expectations, but I am still wondering did she really do what she said she did? Whatever the truth she was a complex woman and a very private one at that.

Many thanks to the publishers, Picador, for my review copy via NetGalley.

As a historian I jumped on this book when it first came out. I realise that it has been Beloved by most bloggers But I don’t know I just couldn’t get into it as much as I thought I would. It’s a three star for me as it is well researched and well written but it just didn’t hold my interest

Detecting the detective... 5 stars

Susannah Stapleton is a historical researcher and life-long fan of Golden Age crime novels. It was while reading one of Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley novels that she found herself wondering “Were there really lady detectives – proper fleshandblood ones – in the golden age of crime?” A little searching turned up the name of Maud West, who advertised herself as “London’s only Lady detective”. Intrigued, Stapleton turned her research abilities towards finding out more about this elusive woman, and along the way to learning about the world of private detection in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

Maud’s story runs through the centre of the book, and we do gradually learn a good deal about her life. But Stapleton uses her as a jumping off point to look at all kinds of quirky aspects of society of her time, such as the growth in divorce cases, blackmail and extortion rackets, theft and kleptomania in high society, dodgy spiritualists, and the expanding role of women in the professional world – of detection, specifically, but also more generally. She uses actual cases to illustrate her subject matter and writes in an approachable, chatty style that makes the book easy and enjoyable to read. She’s also more than willing to allow her own opinions to come through, thus avoiding the dryness a more academic approach may have had, and she’s often humorous.

Maud was a mistress of self-advertisement, and wrote many articles for the newspapers and magazines of the day in which she related some of her racier adventures, with much gun-slinging, travel to exotic locations and evil blackguards whose dastardly deeds were thwarted by Maud and her team of crack detectives. Each chapter ends with either one of these tales or with an interview given by Maud to a journalist of the day. Stapleton can’t exactly disprove Maud’s stories, but nor could she prove most of them, and she’s clear that she suspects most of them are exaggerated at the very least, if not entirely invented. They add a lot to the fun though.

Stapleton digs down into old newspapers reports to find cases that Maud definitely worked on, and mostly these are to do with rather less glamorous crimes – divorces, thefts, missing persons, etc. That’s not to imply that her real work was dull – Maud was apparently a mistress of disguise, often dressing as a man in order to follow people or cases into places not easy for a “lady” to access. Her work involved her in some of the sensational society divorces of the time, and while the dope factories of South America may have been pure invention, she clearly did traipse around the spots of Europe where the rich Brits abroad got up to skulduggery, often of the amorous kind.

Maud the detective is easier to pin down than Maud the woman, though. Stapleton sifts through the many and varied stories Maud gives of her own origins in interviews over the years, and tries to get at the truth of who Maud was, where she came from, and how she ended up in “an unsuitable job for a woman”. This becomes a detective story in its own right, and the other interesting aspect of the book is that Stapleton takes us with her on her research journey rather than simply presenting us with the results. So we learn how she goes about looking up old records – censuses, birth and death records, newspaper reports and so on – and she tells us when something sets up a suspicion in her mind and how she then sets about proving or disproving it. Sometimes these leaps seem too fanciful, and often peter out, but even as they do they often reveal another piece of the jigsaw. As often happens with me when the subject of a biography is someone who didn’t necessarily want to put her private life in the public gaze, I found some of these details a little too personal, occasionally making me feel a shade uneasy. I was rather glad to discover that Stapleton herself had considered that aspect...

Doubt rippled through me. Had I got carried away? Were the dead fair game? And, if so, just how dead did they have to be to make it okay? Was Maud dead enough?

Without wishing to spoil the story, by the end, like Stapleton, I felt somewhat reassured about the acceptability of publishing the revelations she discovered along the way.

Stapleton also discovered that Maud’s claim to be London’s only Lady detective was entirely untrue. Not only were there other detective firms owned and run by women, but there were lots of women employed as store detectives, or working alongside the police in cases where women were able to gain easier access – in the fight against prostitution, for example, or secretly policing society events, or monitoring the more violent suffragette groups. Stapleton tells of how women gradually began to be officially employed by the police, usually as clerks but sometimes involved in detective work.

As the Leeds Mercury commented, however, ‘like all leagues to put women in the place which according to man they should occupy, the League of Womanhood has a man for its organiser.’ In this case, it was Captain Alfred Henderson-Livesey, a former officer in the Household Cavalry, who had devoted himself to reclaiming public life as an exclusively male sphere.
He’d even written a book on the subject. Sex and Public Life was, naturally, dedicated to his mother, and had a bright yellow binding to match the bile within. The main thrust of his argument was that professional women were not real women but genetically abnormal ‘sexual intermediates’ whose second-rate achievements were of interest purely because of their sex. As such, they must be stopped from corrupting the nation’s true womenfolk before the whole ‘virile race’ descended into debauched halfwittery.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Maud’s story is interesting in itself, but even more fascinating are all the insights into the darker recesses of Golden Age society and particularly the rapidly changing role of women in these early years of the fight for equality. I liked Stapleton’s relaxed and often humorously judgemental and sarcastic style, and found her account of her own researches as entertaining as the information they uncovered. And for Golden Age fans, there’s a special treat in the chapter headings, mostly (perhaps all) taken from the titles of famous mystery novels and stories – Partners in Crime, A Kiss Before Dying, A Case of Identity, etc. – and the various hidden references to some of the greats Stapleton makes in her text. Highly recommended!

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Picador.

Being a life long fan of Golden Age crime novels, I was instantly attracted to a biography of a real early twentieth century female private detective. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I certainly envisioned a dry biography; this was far from the case. The book is written as a detective novel in its own right, with Susannah Stapleton taking us on her journey in tracking down the elusive details of Maud’s life. Interspersed with these are stories and articles that the lady detective wrote about her adventures (and that is certainly the right word to use) that break up the research nicely.

This is not just a book about one woman though but illuminates the society in which she lived. The court cases where private detectives of the era gave evidence are an interesting sidelight into the changing moral and social landscape caused by both the First World War and the legal changes that followed it. Susannah Stapleton’s pursuit of details of Miss West’s family give us an insight into the opportunities available to the less affluent inhabitants of London and brings the challenges they faced alive. Honestly, while Maud West’s professional life was interesting, it was her personal life that I found the most fascinating aspect of the book.

Ultimately, this was a fast-paced read revealing a complex woman working in what was thought of as a man’s job at a time when equality was still unavailable to most women. I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in either the time period or the early history of detection.

Brilliant read!! I loved everything about it: from the voice of the narrator to the entire process of researching Maud West, so well detailed and therefore so satisfying, to everything in between: Maud's articles, the photos, all the historical details about detectives and their job but also changes in law and customs and the impact on society.

I had high hopes for this book after all what self-respecting crime fiction lover with a strong interest in women’s history could resist. This book more than surpassed those high expectations, so much so that despite having other books to review (a whole stack of them) I couldn’t wait to share this one.

Maud West was good at self-promotion. She advertised in the press and submitted to interviews telling of her daring deeds both close to home and in far flung places. She dealt with blackmail, drugs and divorce cases from an office in Albion Place, opposite the British Museum in London.

Susannah Stapeton is interested in Maud West’s daring deeds, although right from the start she takes them with a hefty pinch of salt, for some reason doubting the gun toting spinster really had quite so much excitement when she set up her detective agency back in 1905. But what the author is more interested in is the woman behind the public face. So she goes a searching in the archives:

‘The age was off by a few years, but she undeniably showed the right amount of pluck. Besides, who better to catch villains than a former master criminal?’

This is a book that manages to balance a flavour of the reality of Maud West’s life as a ‘lady detective’ whilst providing the reader with a picture of life from the start of her detective work up to the outbreak of the second world war. While Maud West proclaims on her shadowing for divorce work, the author provides us with some real life examples of cases that were reported at the time emphasising the points of law that were required to secure a break from an unhappy life. We take in Maud’s skill at disguise, we take a trip to drug manufacture and its use in the 1920s, we touch on suffragette movement and the romance frauds more easily committed due to the large imbalance of women to men following the first world war. It’s fair to say we get a taster of so much social history set against an investigation into the private face of the public lady detective.
'In fiction the woman detective is always young and fascinating; her skill in handling delicate situation and in solving the most puzzling mysteries arouses admiration. She is fearless and knows how to handle an automatic pistol. Prepare to be astonished: greet one in real life!'

I am hard pushed to decide which part I enjoyed more because hearing how Susannah Stapleton tracked down the ‘real’ Maud West was equally fascinating and will be of interest I’m sure to anyone who has dabbled in genealogy because here we have the author making the similar leaps and links, not all successful, that is required to get to the truth. I was honestly just as thrilled watching the author wondering about those other people living cheek to jowl on census night and putting their names to one side, and then seeing why they were there many pages further on. The style might not be to everyone’s taste but for me I found it leant an air of realism to the research is usually hidden from the reader.

One of the great problems with reviewing this non-fiction book that concentrates on a less than well-known subject is that there is little I can say because in a sense this is a detective novel in its own right and I would have been gutted if I’d had even an inkling of some of the information I discovered whilst reading it. I can say that there are some aspects of ‘real-life’ incredibly pleasing such as finding that Hawley Harvey Crippin worked from the same building as Maud West and it was here that Inspector Dew first interviewed him.
This style wouldn’t have worked as well had the author not adopted a light touch in terms of writing style. Whilst not a laugh out loud level of looking on the wry side of life…

'… however it ended – Maud was plainly better off out of it. George Stafford Howell was a chancer. He admitted to the judge that he dropped the ‘Howell’ from his name when it suited him, and his business enterprises all seemed doomed to failure.’

So in short, if you want a non-fiction book with a difference then don’t miss out on this gem.

I am extremely grateful to the publishers Pan Macmillan for providing me with an advance copy of The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective, and of course to Susannah Stapleton for bringing this previously unheard lady detective to my attention. This unbiased review is my thanks to them.

This book encapsulates why I love reading; to be educated and entertained at the same time is a pleasure indeed and so it is fitting that this was the first of my 20 Books for Summer 2019 Challenge!

First Published UK: 13 June 2019
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
No. of Pages: 320
Genre: Non-Fiction
Amazon UK
Amazon US

This is an interesting read with lots of social history from the first half of the twentieth century. Ultimately though, Maud West herself remains a shadowy figure despite the best efforts of Susannah Stapleton to uncover her story. Much of interest about the role of women from about 1850 - 1950.

You've probably never heard of her, but Maud West ran a detective agency in London for more than thirty years, starting in 1905. No, seriously. This isn't fiction, this is biography.  In her first book, Susannah Stapleton tries to separate the truth from invention about a real-life lady detective, who was working in London while the golden age of Crime fiction was happening.  And it's very hard to work out what the truth is.  Maud was a mistress of self promotion, but some of her stories read exactly like the detective stories of the era.  Stapleton takes you through her research and her quest to find out the truth about Maud's life and her cases.

Maud's life is fascinating, Stapleton is an engaging writer - and you get to see behind the scenes of the process - of how she tracked down the traces Maud has left behind in the historical record.  And that latter bit is almost as fascinating to me as the actual story. As a history grad who did her dissertation research in an undigitised archive in the middle of France it was awesome to see Stapleton using the full power of digital archives to find a life that could otherwise have been lost to history.  It was almost enough to make me miss historical research.  Although as I'm still getting dissertation anxiety dreams more than a decade on, it was quite a fleeting feeling!

I raced through this - starting it on the plane out on Sunday and finished it off in the Riviera sun.  I even rationed my self to read it slower to make it last.  That's how good it was.  There's all sorts of period details in here too - I know I'll be walking down New Oxford Street looking for the spot where her offices used to be. And if that's not enough to convince you - the research in this book is so fresh, that Maud has only had a Wikipedia page since Sunday - three days after the book was published.  I look forward to seeing what Stapleton does next - and I can only hope that this book does really well and persuades publishers that we need more books like this.  And historians and writers out there - please go and write them.

Susannah Stapleton has written an engaging and authoritative account of a truly remarkable lady. I’d never heard of Maud West and her detective agency. What a gal; not only does she take on a male dominated job, she dons cross dressing disguise, travels all over the place, can shoot and some of her cases are the stuff of both comedy and Hollywood. It borders on surreal and I had to keep reminding myself that it’s all true.

The research appears to be meticulous. There’s almost a dual narrative as the author explains how she’s undertaking her research and the difficulties in following some of the leads to this often enigmatic and somewhat elusive figure. It’s an illuminating and fascinating read and I loved it.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

This is a very different and intriguing book. The question should be "will the real Maud West stand up?" She had so many facets to her character that each chapter produces 'a new Maud West'. Ms. Stapleton must have trawled through hundreds of census, newspapers and documents in writi g this book and I feel that the effort was worthwhile as she has produced a very interesting and unusual story.

Five out of five completely fabricated thrilling tales of derring-do to The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective.

I was hooked from the first few pages of this book, when the author, Susannah Stapleton, describes how she found herself suddenly ungripped by her favourite Golden Age detective stories and decided instead to find out about real women detectives of the time. Maud West is who she found, and Maud West is who she investigates.

Don’t pick up The Adventures of Maud West expecting thrilling romps through exotic locales and narrow escapes from death! No, this is a much more laid-back and subtle book than that. And, while I enjoy a good death-defying piece of heroism (the lives of the women SOE agents, for example, fascinate me – and yet they too were, ultimately, perfectly ordinary women who just ended up doing extraordinary things), I loved the way that Maud West was unfolded throughout this book.

Just as this isn’t a series of hair-raising adventures, it also isn’t precisely a biography in the usual sense. Certainly it deals with many of the facts and mysteries of Maud West’s life, but it’s just as much a journey with Susannah Stapleton as she begins with a few quick searches and gradually dives deeper and deeper into the life of her subject. We go along for the ride as she becomes more and more fascinated with the shadowy Maud West, sometimes excited, sometimes disillusioned, always trying to make the pieces into something coherent.

The format of this book is a lot of fun. Almost the first thing the author discovered related to Maud West was a series of stories in a truly trashy weekly magazine. These stories were not only full of the best detective story tropes and astonishing feats of brilliance and survival, but were written by Maud West herself. The rest of the book consists of alternated chapters describing Stapleton’s investigation, and selected stories of her thrilling adventures by Maud West.

The format can make the narrative a little bit disjointed but these bonkers stories were so much fun to read that I didn’t really care. Plus, there is a great contrast between the woman portrayed in the stories – a woman who is a crack shot with a pistol, cross-dresses regularly, and never loses her cool in the face of almost certain death – and the very ordinary (but still intriguing!) woman who emerges from Susannah Stapleton’s researches. Altogether it makes for a fascinating read.

I also appreciated the part where the author explains how when she realised she might be able to trace people still alive today who remembered Maud West, she wasn’t actually sure she wanted to. It reminded me vividly of the conversations in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night about the moral duty of an academic to bring all the facts to light, no matter their personal feelings in the matter. Perhaps it’s rather silly but I did enjoy the real-life parallel!

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed The Adventures of Maud West. It was a light, fun, interesting read about a very ordinary woman trying to make her way and support her family in a man’s world. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys biographies of excellent women or detective stories.