The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective
For Sarah
Contents
Prologue The Lady Vanishes
Chapter One The Documents in the Case
The Creeping Tiger by Maud West
Chapter Two The Body in the Library
The Lady with the Blue Spectacles by Maud West
Chapter Three Crooked House
The Apaches of Saint-Cloud by Maud West
Chapter Four They Do It With Mirrors
The Diamond Necklace by Maud West
Chapter Five The Shadow in the House
The Prince of Lovers by Maud West
Chapter Six To Love and Be Wise
The Chelsea Artist by Maud West
Chapter Seven A Kiss Before Dying
A Lady’s Folly by Maud West
Chapter Eight The Secret Adversary
The Clairvoyante Case by Maud West
Chapter Nine Wanted: Someone Innocent
The Countess and the Snowman by Maud West
Chapter Ten Tracks in the Snow
An Unusual Pastime: as related by the San Francisco Examiner
Chapter Eleven Partners in Crime
The Fatal Letter by Maud West
Chapter Twelve The Wrong Man
A Poisonous Revenge by Maud West
Chapter Thirteen Sweet Danger
The End of His Tether by Maud West
Chapter Fourteen Look to the Lady
Such a Dull Job! Or, Fifteen Minutes with a London
Woman Detective: Interview with Maud West
Chapter Fifteen A Case of Identity
Chapter Sixteen Farewell, My Lovely
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Picture Acknowledgements
Prologue
The Lady Vanishes
One evening in 1939, Maud West, London’s leading lady detective, locked the door to her Bloomsbury office and promptly disappeared, never to be seen again. Her exploits over the past thirty-four years had taken her around the world, snooping in drug dens, grand country houses, mental asylums and more. She had unmasked blackmailers, caught adulterers, foiled jewel thieves and shut down cults, all on behalf of a client list that could have been lifted from the pages of Debrett’s. The press loved her – a real lady sleuth in the golden age of crime – and newspapers across the globe reported tales of her derring-do.
And now she was gone.
As one would expect, Maud West had amassed a fair few nemeses over the years. But she wasn’t abducted that night in 1939, nor was she killed or harmed in any way. She didn’t hide out in a Harrogate hotel or wake up swathed in bandages, hurtling across Germany on a Hitchcockian train. She simply ceased to exist – if it could be said that Maud West had ever truly existed at all.
That said, she used to be easy enough to find. If there was no London telephone directory to hand, a quick glance at the personals column of any major newspaper would do the job.
See? There she is.
Chapter One
The Documents in the Case
… in all good faith to other women who would become detectives, I would utter one word of advice – Don’t.
Maud West, 19141
Maybe I should have walked away at the first sign of deceit; after the incident with the bear-skin rug, perhaps, or during that ridiculous car chase across Hampstead Heath. In Paris? Or Rio? There were so many times I could have turned back and just left her to it. But then I would never have met the Countess or the Prince of Lovers, or learned how to rig an office safe with chloroform or whip up a disguise using only a piece of orange peel and a wisp of goat hair. I’d never have laughed with her or wept for her; I’d never have seen what lay beneath. Besides, I’m not sure I even had a choice. There was almost a sense of inevitability about the whole thing.
Looking back, you could say that our paths began to converge on Boxing Day 1984, when the magnificent Joan Hickson, in her first tweedy outing as Miss Marple, pottered into my family’s sitting room to investigate The Body in the Library. Just shy of my twelfth birthday, I was immediately and irreparably entranced – by the whodunnit, yes, and the frocks, the hats, the gigolos and jazz fiends, but, most of all, by the idea of all those delicious secrets lying so perilously close to the surface. Before long, I’d sought out the books for my own private feasts of sparkling cyanide and arsenic-laced prawns, and taken up snooping on the side. By the time I was thirteen, I was eyeing up louche lipstick in the village chemist, sneaking the occasional cigarillo and dabbling in a bit of light blackmail. It was only the threat – and subsequent reality – of boarding school that put paid to an otherwise promising future as a Jazz Age reprobate.
Somewhere along the way, my talent for muckraking was guided into a career in history, where it was thought I could do less harm. But I never gave up the detective stories. If I learned anything from my two-year incarceration in a ladies’ college, it was that there’s nothing like a good murder to lift the spirits. As the years went on, I put this to good use in what became something of an annual ritual: in the darkest days of winter, I’d take a couple of weeks off work, build a nest by the fire and escape into a world of daggers, poisons, wrath and revenge. It never failed to beat away the winter blues. Until, that is, a few years ago.
All the usual elements were in place that winter: miserable weather, a build-up of petty resentments, a stack of green Penguins foraged from second-hand bookshops. Yet, however much I craved that state of rightness-with-the-world, where the bodies are all lined up, someone is on their way to the gallows and a cup of cocoa awaits before bed, I couldn’t find a way in. As the first week wore on, a trail of half-read books lay scattered throughout the house, old friends abandoned mid-sentence: Harriet Vane motionless under the bed; Nero Wolfe sliding down the back of the sofa. I couldn’t settle to anything.
Instead, my mind kept going back to a historical missing-persons case I’d recently completed. It had arisen out of some exhibition work I had done for a museum, and my quarry had been a minor nineteenth-century inventor whose fate had stumped a small band of collectors and enthusiasts for decades. The case had taken me on an exciting jaunt, on paper at least, from Liverpool to Havana, with a small attempted coup in Spain along the way. There had been exploding steamships, secret marriages, royal pardons, family feuds and a sad, gin-pickled end. When I thought about it, I’d been feeling a bit flat ever since. I missed the thrill of the chase.
I didn’t want to read about detectives; I wanted to be one. But when I tried to think of what to tackle next, the only mysteries that came to mind were the Princes in the Tower, Jack the Ripper and the Holy Grail, and my chances of solving any of those were slim at best. Besides, I wanted fresh ground, a mystery of my very own. And there was the problem. It had to be something that no one knew about, including me.
The solution, of course, was right under my nose – or rather under my bed and down the back of my sofa – but it took a while to filter through into conscious thought. It surfaced late one evening. I’d been yawning my way through the opening chapters of Gladys Mitchell’s Death at the Opera, waiting for someone to die so the eccentric Mrs Bradley could start sleuthing, and was about to call it a night when there it was, the question from which there would be no turning back. Were there really lady detectives – proper flesh-and-blood ones – in the golden age of crime?
I reached for my laptop. Google didn’t know. I tried various online encyclopedias and library records. Nothing. It was only when I turned to the National Archives’ Discovery catalogue that I had my answer. There was at least one:
It was a description of a press photograph, the title presumably taken from
a label on the reverse. There was no date, but the language sounded about right for the inter-war years. London’s only lady detective? That had potential. The original was held at Manchester Archives, so I typed a short email requesting a copy and went to bed, planning to delve a bit deeper in the morning.
Half an hour later, I was up again. How had I never heard of Maud West? A quick search on her name suggested I was not alone. London’s only lady detective had slipped into obscurity. She’d received a brief mention in one recent book (Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War) and a couple of related blog posts, but it appeared that even they knew nothing beyond the fact of her existence. What’s more, they all cited the same source: British Women in the Twentieth Century, Elsie M. Lang’s survey of pioneer businesswomen, published in 1929, a copy of which was somewhere in my possession.
I’d always had a soft spot for Elsie Lang. Her bread-and-butter work was writing about crumbling buildings (Some Old English Abbeys, The Oxford Colleges, etc.), the kind of gentle, pleasant labour I knew well. But, every so often, she would come out with something that revealed a fierce hinterland – a translation of Venetian poetry about the Medici women, for example, or this 1929 celebration of female liberation. Over the years, it had become something of a set text for those interested in twentieth-century women’s history. As well as setting out in clear terms the struggles women had faced in getting a higher education, the right to vote, access to birth control, freedom from rib-crunching corsetry and countless other challenges, it was also a book of firsts – the first female MP, the first woman barrister, the first female racing driver, and so on. There were explorers, accountants, aviators and surgeons, but I didn’t remember any detectives.
After numerous rounds of the house, rummaging through overcrowded bookshelves, I finally found my copy. And there she was, in the index: West, Maud, 273. What had Elsie said about her? And how had I missed it? Perhaps I’d never read to the end, because she appeared on the very last page, almost as an afterthought, squeezed in between a pageant producer and a company director in a list of career options for women. There were just six words:
Miss Maud West is a detective.
The game was afoot.
The next morning, I flicked through the pages of British Women in the Twentieth Century whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. Maud West may have warranted only six words, but the fact that she had made it into the book at all placed her in formidable company. Elsie Lang’s women were the epitome of female achievement in a man’s world. Some had degrees, others had worked their way up from the bottom of their respective fields, but they were all mavericks in one way or another. These were women who made the headlines, whether they were the lone female voice in Parliament or striding solo across the Serengeti. They were impossible to ignore.
I sat down at my desk and brought up The Times’ online archive. Had Maud West been impossible to ignore? Had she made the headlines? After a bit of rootling around, it didn’t look as though she had. There was nothing in the main news section at all, not even any mention of her giving evidence in court. There were, however, two advertisements. The first appeared a few times during the course of 1909:
A high-class firm specializing in private enquiries and delicate matters? Add in the description of her peering through a magnifying glass in the Manchester Archives photo, and Maud West was shaping up to be a proper consulting detective of the sort I’d been reading about for years. Even that ‘Are you worried? If so, consult me!’ reminded me of the adverts at the start of Agatha Christie’s Parker Pyne stories (‘Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne …’). The main difference, it seemed, was that Maud West had staff. London’s lady detective was no part-time dabbler, working from home and occasionally calling on the assistance of a trusty sidekick or a raggle-taggle bunch of street urchins. She was running a serious operation with an office full of employees in the heart of the city.
The second advertisement read:
This was from March 1936, so she’d clearly had a long career – nearly thirty years, at least – and one interesting enough for reminiscences. Was there a record of the talk somewhere? What had she said? Thirty years was long enough to develop a good stock of anecdotes; she was bound to have had a few adventures and mishaps along the way. Had she worked with the police? Did she have inside knowledge of any of the big cases of her day? Or did she speak in more general terms about her work? And, if so, what did that involve?
I found an answer, in part, in the social column of the Sunday Times. It only told me what she had been doing on one specific evening in November 1930 and it didn’t really help in terms of understanding her work, as she was off duty that night, but it still took my breath away:
Maud West had met the mighty Dorothy L. Sayers: novelist, translator, theologian and founding member of the Detection Club, at which the top golden-age crime writers met to dine, collaborate and indulge in strange rituals involving a skull named Eric. At the very least, Maud had shaken her hand and introduced her to the Efficiency Club (whatever that might be). But was that their only encounter? Did they go for dinner afterwards and swap crime stories? Were they friends? Was it worth going to America, where Sayers’ diaries and letters were kept, to find out? I felt the familiar tingle of worlds intersecting and ideas sparking.
But I was getting ahead of myself. I didn’t even have a sense of who Maud West was, let alone what sort of friends she had. She was just a shadow, a faceless blur, her edges defined only by her fictional counterparts. I traced my finger over her advertisement and found myself wishing, not for the first time, that I could pick up the phone and dial a long-defunct number. I could almost hear the crackling of the line and a faint voice echoing across the years: ‘Hullo? Gerrard 8561? Miss West speaking.’
I mentally dropped the receiver back into its cradle. What would I say? I’d always had specific questions in mind during previous reveries, very precise whens and whys and what-on-earths. This was different. ‘Who are you?’ seemed a bit blunt, but that was what I wanted to know. Who was Maud West? Where did she come from? How did she end up in such an unusual job?
Put like that, these questions seemed such basic interview fare that I was certain that someone had asked them before. Some curious journalist must have spotted her adverts or gone along to her ‘reminiscences’ and wanted to follow up the story – and if it hadn’t been the gentlemen of The Times, then what about their tabloid cousins? They were always on the lookout for oddities and oddballs. How could they have resisted a lady detective?
From my home in Shropshire, I didn’t have access to the digital archives of the more gossipy rags like the Daily Mirror or the Daily Mail. These were restricted to members of academic institutions and I’d need to go to the British Library to view them. Looking out of the window at the cold, relentless drizzle, the prospect didn’t appeal. Fortunately, there were alternatives: the numerous open-access newspaper websites run by various bodies around the world.
I decided to start with Trove, the online archive maintained by the National Library of Australia. From experience, I knew that many overseas newspapers carried both fragments and whole reprints of articles that had originally featured in British national newspapers and magazines. I suspected that if Maud West had appeared in the British tabloids, however briefly, she would be found here.
My hunch paid off. But it wasn’t just one or two articles I found; it was dozens. Over the next few days, my printer churned out piece after piece about Maud West. Encouraged, I checked a few more online archives and found articles in the New York Tribune, the Times of India, the Singapore Free Press and a number of foreign-language newspapers. I’d barely scratched the surface, but it was clear that news of London’s lady detective had spread throughout the world:
The articles ranged in date from 1913 to 1938. Some were just snippets, pointing out the curiosity of a female sleuth. Time magazine, for example, included her advertisement in
a round-up of strange items found in a single issue of London’s Morning Post from 1934.2 But there were also signs of the interviews I’d been hoping for. Most of the quotes were second-hand, maybe even third-hand, but it was obvious that over the years more than one person had sat down with Maud West and asked about her work.
I found an answer to one of my questions almost immediately, in the Perth Daily News from 1926:
It was chance, not impelling desire, which made her take up this unusual work for a woman. Having nothing to do a solicitor relation asked her to help him solve a hotel robbery by going there as a waitress. In a spirit of adventure Miss West went. Although she knew nothing of waiting … by the time she had picked up enough of the art to pass muster she had discovered the thief. Her success led to other commissions, and eventually to the suggestion that she should take up the work professionally. She did.3
There were also a few hints about the type of cases she took on. According to some eastern European news reports from 1913, she was hired to blend in with the guests at society parties to protect her hosts’ property from damage by militant suffragettes, whilst an advertisement for a security agency in New Zealand listed her alongside the famous Pinkerton’s Detective Agency in New York as one of their overseas agents for chasing debts.4 Other articles talked about how she gathered evidence of adultery for divorce cases, work which could take her all over Europe. ‘In shadowing one lady just before the war,’ she said in 1915, ‘I had to travel to Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Ostend, and back to London in the same week.’5
On the whole, however, by the time these interviews had filtered through to the international press, they had been distilled into headline-grabbing pieces about ‘the Woman Sherlock Holmes’, devoid of any useful facts and full of hyperbole. There was much lamenting her lack of deerstalker and violin, and one reporter even moved the location of Maud’s New Oxford Street base to the more convenient Baker Street, ‘a stone’s throw from the rooms of the immortal Holmes.’6 They revelled in the heady mix of glamour and adventure that the life of a woman detective implied, describing her office with its luxurious ‘inch-deep carpet, Prussian blue papered walls and New Art statuettes’ and revealing the contents of the overnight bag she kept there for emergencies (‘revolver, hypodermic syringe, vial of dope, a half dozen disguises’).7