This book is an eclectic mix, part biography, part historian's detective story and part social history, and it is this which gives the book its strengths and in part its weaknesses. The book is one of thirds with the central one feeling like padding.

The historian's viewpoint and painstaking research is well described and shows the process to the reader with various avenues followed, some with the inevitable cul-de-sac. This is a most satisfying element in this book.

The biography is hard to chase in some parts of the book as the social history of the age takes over at times, I think that some judicious editing may have resolved this imbalance. It feels like the author is easily distracted by other interesting things happening in the period, a problem I have myself, however choosing the material to put in does seem to have eluded Susannah Stapleton at times, not all background research needs to be used.

The criticisms noted I would say that the book is well written and does introduce the reader to a character largely unknown and the shadowy world in which she lived also setting it in some context, the narrative is interspersed with pieces published by Maud West through her career and help to give a sense of this elusive woman and her adventures. In terms of a score I would give 3.5 but this is rounded up to 4.

#TheAdventuresOfMaudWestLadyDetective #NetGalley

Author Susannah Stapleton is a lover of mysteries and tucks herself away each year for what sounds like a perfect break – a winter, binge read, of her favourite novels. My jealousy at the thought of holidays that do not involve airports, packing, heat, or unknown places, nearly undid me. However, one winter, Ms Stapleton is unable to get into the mood for her annual book binge. Also like myself, a lover of Golden Age mysteries, she wonders whether there were any real Lady Detectives, and comes across Maud West. This glimpse of a long-forgotten, female detective agency, leads the author into an investigation of her own.

During this book, we follow the author’s research into Maud West’s life story. The tales of her investigation are mixed with West’s biography, as it is gradually unearthed, alongside wonderful articles about her cases, written by West herself. From the first chapter we are aware that Maud West met Dorothy L. Sayers and this book will surely appeal to all lovers of Golden Age crime fiction, as well as mentioning many famous criminal cases of the day.

This really is a joyous read for those of us who have a fascination for this era, and who find interest in the challenge of academic research. Stapleton is adept at introducing social history, alongside the anecdotes, adventures and articles. We read of WWI, suffragettes, Chelsea artists, society ladies, blackmail, indiscretions, spiritualists, missing people, opium, disguises and jewel thieves.

Maud West delighted in putting herself centre stage in her tales of derring-do and the author has to work hard to distinguish truth from fiction. Maud West is such an interesting character and I am so pleased that I learnt about her, and the work of female detectives between the wars, as well as delighting in the company of the author, as she narrates her story. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

A great book. Throughly researched and interesting read. If you love detective stories and you want something different then this is the one for you.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

This is an obviously well researched book about an interesting and fascinating lady. It did not fully hold my attention in some parts. I expected a bit more from the story.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

I have a confession. I am a serial procrastinator. I am also an inveterate researcher, who sometimes gets to busy researching a subject, I run out of time to actually write the research up. Therefore, I have sometimes seen subjects I’ve identified as interesting, and spent a considerable amount of time researching, being then covered by someone else who is less of a procrastinator, and who published a book on the very subject I’ve been researching.

Imagine my feelings, then, when I realised that a book was about to be published featuring a woman I’ve been looking at - the private detective Maud West, who operated from the early years of the 20th century up until World War 2. This has been part of wider research into the history of female private detectives in Britain - a subject I’ve now spent probably about two years looking at, but have done shamefully little with.

This is partly because I didn’t quite know how to write the book I wanted to write about it all. The nature of private detection means that sometimes there is relatively little to go on in terms of these women’s day to day lives, the minutiae of their jobs. In addition, where there is material available - such as in the PR interviews some happily gave the press - it is hard to separate fact from fiction, such was their skill at hyperbole and self-promotion. I had the basic material, but couldn’t work out how to write a book that did justice to women who appeared so interesting, working in a fascinating field. Researching these women and trying to find out who they really were was the interesting part - particularly with Maud West, whose fake professional name and murky past had to be untangled with care. But how to write a full account of their lives?

What Susannah Stapleton has done in her new book is to acknowledge that difficulty, and the approach she has wisely taken is to use her research process, how she went about finding out who Maud really was, as her focus. Interspersed with this are parts of the archival trail - photographs found in newspapers, reports about Maud, newspaper advertisements for her services - alongside interviews she gave, detailing various cases. The actual biography is therefore relatively thin, as perhaps is inevitable.

I was reassured that Susannah had found out what I had: that Maud was really an illegitimate south London woman named Edith Maria Barber (named after a dead aunt who died in infancy), who had married a rather quirky man named Henry Elliott, and had several children all while she was operating her London-based detective agency. Various relatives worked for her at different stages, including her husband and some of her children (including her two daughters, Vera and Evelyn). The archival material I had painstakingly found - from the proof of her illegitimacy to the World War 2 tribunal testimony given by a rather hypochondriac Henry - had also been hunted down by Susannah, with her tracking of sources and rumours made explicit in her narrative. She teases information throughout the book, suggesting dead ends that are later worked round, or sorted out.

Where we differed in our approach was in trying to find out what happened to Maud West following her retirement: through looking on Ancestry and FreeBMD I had found that she had retired first to Surrey, and then, after her husband’s death, to Bexhill on Sea. The BMD records showed me that she had died in 1964 - this was the easy part for me in researching her life, without having to leave my desk. But Susannah finds this information in a different way, by tracking down one of Edith’s nephews, who can tell her what happened. It wasn’t necessary, but it makes for a more interesting, personal narrative - one that involves a road trip, some tea - and a recognition that sometimes, you’re so bound up in the life of a person long dead, where you don’t have to leave your online sources, that you panic about how to communicate with someone - a real person, who lives in your present - who is actually part of her family. I thought her recognition of this was a lovely acknowledgement of issues many of us have faced.

Interspersed into the story is details of some of the other female detectives - including the fascinating Antonia Moser, whose life is worthy of its own biography (a well-to-do woman who was married off to her cousin, she started work for Moser and the two married individuals started an affair that caused a scandal when it hit the divorce courts; she was later an active suffragist, corresponding with the more famous Suffragettes and writing numerous letters to local papers on women’s suffrage issues); and Kate Easton, Maud’s nearest rival and long-standing private detective. She also makes the link between acting and private detective work, for Kate Easton was a former actress, and she strongly suspects Maud of having both met Kate in this arena, and of having been an actress herself before both women - she posits - working together before Maud sets up a rival agency, possibly creating bad feeling between the two.

This link between the theatrical profession and private detection could have been made more of, for of course, the adoption of different roles often necessary in the private inquiry world (as Maud made clear in her numerous press interviews) was similar to that in the acting world, and thus it is clear that private inquiry work would have been an attractive profession for actresses struggling to make a consistent living, for it utilised similar skills to those they already knew. Similarly, the ‘Dorothy Hempest’ who the author refers to in the book as a private inquiry agent of whom little is known about was actually Dorothy Tempest, another actress who appears to have dabbled in fortune telling and who was therefore the ideal person to spy on other fortune tellers as a private detective in an infamous Edwardian case. Dorothy can later be found working variously as an actress and as a collection agent - part of the more mundane work of a private detective.

There are numerous other female private detectives one could write about, and I hope that I might get the chance to do so, even if it needs more of a journal article-length piece, rather than a book. As Susannah shows, it’s difficult to build a three-dimensional picture of such women’s lives and works in isolation, but sometimes the story is equally in how we go about finding out what we can about these women, and what that says about our own interests and obsessions as writers and researchers. She recognises that, and in consequence, writes an easy-to-read, enjoyable romp that is not only about Maud West, but also about Susannah.

This is a well-researched account of the life of one of the UK's first female private detectives and an earnest attempt to bring a lost historical figure back to life. The author writes well and I enjoyed the way she exposed the processes of her research and her own doubts about the work along the way.
Nevertheless I felt the book didn't quite live up to the promise of the first few chapters. It became clear that it had not been possible to find out quite enough about Maud's life to fully deliver her story and so the gaps were filled with various intertwining personal histories and aspects of social history from the period which were hit-and-miss in their level of interest to me.

Review: The Adventures Of Maud West by Susannah Stapleton. 

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having started sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905, and this book allows to delve into her many exploits in a time where women were just beginning to create lives of their own. 

The fact that all these cases are real, are part of Maud’s work is just so incredible to read. You hear of course about the fictional women of the era, this is after all set in the golden age of crime fiction with writers like Agatha Christie writing prolifically, but knowing Maud West was out there doing these things for real is just such a joy to read. 

The research the author does, finding her family, working through new stories and deciphering the truth from the fiction, Stapleton does an excellent job at delivering these incredible cases, bringing these stories to life by tying different famous people of the time into them and adding more of the atmosphere of the era into it, giving us an incredible scene of what we are reading about. 

A great book that allows us to get to know a great woman, The Adventures Of Maud West is a collection of cases, you want to be her companion in detection. 



(I received an ARC from NetGalley for honest review).

A fascinating book about a real-life lady detective in the early years of the 20th century. The writer does her own detection, to uncover the true story of Maud West, which isn't at all what it first seems. A riveting, and unusual book.

This book was sparked by the question about whether there were any real-life female detectives working in the period of the Golden Age of crime fiction, the
1920s and 1930s. The writer, Susannah Stapleton, found an advertisement for the detective services of Maud West in an old newspaper and the story goes from there.

This is more than just a straightforward biography as it also covers Stapleton's own investigations and methods of finding out more about the mysterious Maud. The reader is taken on the journey as Stapleton visits archives and relatives, has breakthroughs and setbacks, and feels both respect and dislike for her subject in turn. It is interesting for those who want to understand the methods of historical research as much as wanting to find out about Maud herself.

Maud is an engaging but also elusive figure. The revelations about her fascinating life come thick and fast, although there is also a lot of conjecture to fill in the gaps in Maud's life that have been lost to history, unrecorded possibly because of her status as a woman not born to a high class. Instead, Maud has humble beginnings and shows a remarkable determination to forge her own path.

I did really enjoy this, although I found the questioning style of the writing a little irritating at times. I understand the need to follow Stapleton's thoughts, but it was overdone and just kept opening up uncertainties that often were not addressed.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in real life detectives, especially a woman operating in a traditionally masculine sphere. Maud's bizarre disguises and far-fetched tales will certainly keep you reading!

I have always been interested in this era and love golden age crime fiction, so Susannah Stapleton’s insight into the life of a female private detective from the early decades of the 20th century was fascinating.
She interspersed her chapters with Maud’s own writings on her adventures and Maud proved as elusive as some of her cases, with Susannah admitting to a difficulty at times in telling fact from fiction.
I always took those crime novels featuring fictional lady detectives from the 20‘s and 30‘s with a pinch of salt, but this excellent book proves how wrong that is as Maud West was not the only one by far and we hear about her rivals, in some cases literally on the same street.
Susannah ‘shows her workings’ as my old maths teacher would say, and I enjoyed reading about her research, trawling newspaper archives here and overseas, even going as far as finding living relatives.
This book also give an insiders view on the shenanigans of the supposedly morally upright society types of the late Victorian and Edwardian era.
I thoroughly recommend this excellent read.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book about Maud West. It was an unusual way to present a biography as the reader follows the author's research and the subsequent unfolding of the life story. Much of it is told in first person by the author. As an historian who enjoys research I liked this presentation and found Maud to be a fascinating and complex character.

I absolutely adored The Adventures of Maud West and getting to know this remarkable and at times mystifying woman.

Author Susannah Stapleton takes two weeks off work and snuggles down to indulge her passion for reading mystery novels. Unable to find a book that holds her attention she begins to ponder upon this question, ‘Were there really lady detectives in the golden age of crime?’ Initial research leads to a newspaper cutting advertising the services of ‘Maud West, Lady Detective’. And so begins the hunt for our bona fide female sleuth, and the story that unfolds transports us into an absolutely fascinating, real-life ‘mystery’.