Andrew's Reviews > The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime

A good 7/10 (still unhappy with and resistant to the inadequate 5-star system), I enjoyed most of Susannah Stapleton's The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime. 'Secrets' because there was a private woman behind the name-change to Maud West, that of Edith Maria Barber, married as Elliott, private detective from ~1905-1939, and mother of six children; and 'lies', because she seemed to have invented a lot of thrilling stories à la mode of Conan Doyle, as she undertook largely humdrum and tedious detective work (waiting, watching, divorce cases...) during the Golden Age of the whodunnit - so you can't blame her for her adventurous advertising in frequent articles in weeklies and newspapers, some of which must have added another source of income, and much publicity.

Apart from some tall tales and the emerging picture of a busy and complex character, the book demonstrated the enormous amount of research required in historical non-fiction and biography, made significantly easier since the age of the internet, but still nonetheless required the collation of vast depositories of information that must have seemed to those involved of little use to anyone outside of family. What emerged was the re-creation of a family living through particularly troubled times, with two world wars, the fight of the suffragettes for (at least) greater equality, as well as the ordinary lives of struggle and survival in an age without the NHS and modern conveniences.

It is, of course, a detective story in itself, and while the structure of alternating chapters named after titles of prominent golden age authors (Christie, Allingham, Sayers, Doyle, Tey…) with short pieces by Maud herself was also a record of the journalistic research journey, it meant that, necessarily, there could never be a smooth storyline woven throughout, but each chapter revealing a little more of the character of the industrious sleuth, while concentrating on thematic issues such as types of crime (divorce, blackmail, drugs) and the detection methods (disguise, shadowing, and so on).

Naturally, with a personality like Maud's - self-publicist and part-adventurer - the author was as often confused as I was about what was truth and which fiction, but in the end it's another look at a period which in the imagination, at least, removed from the horrors of those wars and the living conditions of the time, is as much romanticised by us, authors of historical fiction, film-makers and TV studios, as Maud romanticised her profession. We're not too interested in the grime beneath the surface colour, even if the subject is crime in all its indignities. What emerges is a patchwork of pentimenti, but a nonetheless fascinating look at a period and a personality that fills in certain gaps between the whodunnits and mysteries of a golden age of the genre, which create a very personal map of the era in our minds.

I enjoyed the journey - but I must say, I could never undertake such hard work over so long for such a work, of historical non-fiction. I'll stick to the made-up stories. It seems so much easier.