When I first added this book to my wishlist, I thought that Maud West, Lady Detective was a Christie-esque crime novel, but truth is more entertaining than fiction - Miss West was real! Susannah Stapleton, who discovered the forgotten female enquiry agent by chance, delivers a surprising account of professional bravado and personal strengths in an engaging style. I was more interested in Maud's complicated family history than her detective work, real or imagined, and the author combines the two throughout to keep the reader gripped.

Maud West - *not her real name - started advertising her services as a 'lady detective' in 1909 and continued working through the First World War, the Roaring Twenties and right up to the approach of World War Two, earning fame if not fortune, although mostly through her own serialised exploits of dramatic cases in journals and newspapers the world over. She was proficient in disguise, changing her appearance and voice at a moment's notice, good at languages and handy with a gun. Or so she claimed. But who was she really? What was her background, her family life, her training for such an unusual profession? The author put her own qualifications as a historical researcher to the test and discovered hidden family secrets, questionable professional practices - and more questions: 'All I needed was a corpse, and I'd have the makings of a first rate mystery novel.'

Each chapter of Maud's life, and the author's research, is a fascinating glimpse into the past, from blackmail and fraud to divorce and drugs, by way of Maud and her thrilling career/lively imagination. But I'm more of a genealogist than a historian, and loved the revelations about the lady herself, culminating in a meeting between Maud West's 'stalker' and her grandson.

A real life blend of Agatha Christie and the Scarlet Pimpernel, Maud's life and career definitely needs to be fictionalised, as originally imagined, or turned into a miniseries. Such an amazing character! ( )

Fieldnotes:
London, 1905-1930s

1 Researcher Sleuth with a love of Golden Age Crime
1 Reading Slump
1 Idle Search Leading to the Discovery of

London's Foremost (though far from only) Lady Detective
Several Advertisements
12 Lurid Sensationalist Stories of Cases (as written by Maud West)
A Fondness for Disguises
A Possible Music Hall History

Passing Connection to the Scandalous Crippen Case
Several Ugly Divorce Cases
1 Private Family with
Family Tragedies

The Short Version:
This was great fun - a woman grows restless with her crime novels and decides to idly check if there were any real lady detectives during the "Golden Age of Crime" - which sparks a whole research project (and this book).

I liked the Susannah Stapleton on the page immensely. She said things like: "I surveyed my own desk. Was I a woman in command, a worthy match for the slippery Maud West? My own filing system comprised various unstable ziggurats of loose papers, a sprawling database into which everything digital got dumped, countless sticky notes and a jumble of tea-stained notebooks. From where I sat, still in my pyjamas, it seemed doubtful."

As I sit here surrounded by towering piles of books and pens and the occasional small teddy bear, I feel a distinct kinship. When the author also confesses her teenage crush on a historical figure which she nursed through artefacts at the British Museum...well...we were to be happy companions on this quest.

I enjoyed the digging into Maud West's career - the snide advertisement war she waged with her competition, her proximity (in the same building!) to a famous case, her hobnobbing with Dorothy Sayers, and most of all her absurdly sensational stories of her adventures.

The fact is, though, that Maud West's career depended on her discretion - so there isn't a lot of her actual case history to pull together. A lurid divorce here and there, an occasional newspaper mention, photos of her disguises, but not much concrete. And while the research was no doubt interesting, I had far less interest in pinning down Maud West's family life and connections, so the back end of the book was less amusing for me - not to mention that there were (inevitably) family tragedies.

Nevertheless, I found this an absorbing and entertaining read. If Phyrne Fisher and Harriet Vane make you happy and you'd like to read about women like them in "real life", this is one to grab. ( )

A fantastic reveal of the research process wrapped in and around the investigation of Maud West - 1920s female detective. Detailed and fascinating and very clever ( )

Susannah Stapleton tells the story of how she fell down a research rabbit hole. A curiosity about women detectives before the war leads her to an ad about Maud West, Lady Detective and further curiosity leads her down a tangled web of fiction and fact and a woman who could have come from the pages of a golden age detective story. Stapleton even finds a descendent of the family and undercovers tragedy and derring do and lots of red herrings.

Maude wrote some of her adventures for fiction, and had a family. She was a resourceful woman who did what she had to do to survive and eventually closed up her offices and retired early. It was interesting seeing the story unfold and Stapleton recounting her descent down the rabbit hole.

It sounds like something that could happen to me. Given time and resources I could, and have occasionally and it was interesting to read Stapleton's journey. The story detailed her ups and downs during the investigation and there were a lot of hurdles she encountered because Maud West was a very unreliable narrator of her own life.

This is one for both fiction and non-fiction crime and biography readers. Seeing the characters who would probably have inspired Golden Age fiction (Dorothy L Sayers and Maud West met!) in real life makes this quite entertaining as I'm a fan of that era. Seeing a woman carve a life for herself in a world dominated by men is also quite a good thing. There is sadness in some of the extended family but Maud lived a full life up to her death in her 80s. I would read more books by this author. ( )

An absolutely delightful account of the life and times of the eponymous detective, featuring runaway heiresses, drug dens, stolen jewels, and family secrets! In a standard biography the author is usually in the background, but here, in keeping with the flamboyant sleuth's own methods, Stapleton presents the work in the style of a lively detective novel, detailing her searches and surprises along the way. ( )