The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective cover art

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

By: Susannah Stapleton
Narrated by: Clare Wille, Susannah Stapleton
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £8.61

Buy Now for £8.61

About this listen

If you are susceptible to Miss Marple and Harriet Vane you must read The Adventures of Maud West. You will never know the difference between fact and fiction again. Jill Paton Walsh, author of the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mysteries

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having started sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And – as Susannah Stapleton reveals – she was a most unreliable witness to her own life.

Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?

Interweaving tales from Maud West’s own ‘casebook’ with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth.

With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is both a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of ‘good society’ during the first half of the twentieth century.

 Detective Europe Great Britain Historical True Crime Women Crime Suspenseful England

Critic reviews

Terrific ... A brilliant literary sleuth tracks down a real one, uncovering a flabbergasting hidden life along the way. (Lissa Evans, author of Old Baggage and Crooked Heart)
Deliciously entertaining, meticulous and affectionate ... Criminally good. I loved it. (Mel McGrath, author of Give Me the Child and The Guilty Party)
A powerhouse of a book ... The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is, as one suspects Maud herself was, sweet, and wonderful company, and absolutely determined to discover the truth. (Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder and the Sam Clair mysteries)
Maud West is a gloriously English eccentric - think Miranda Hart meets Margaret Rutherford - brought to vigorous life by present day sleuth Susannah Stapleton. (Sean O'Connor, author of Handsome Brute)
Susannah Stapleton’s dogged sleuthing of Maud’s own complicated, messy, spunky life reveals the wider story of a little-explored sliver of life between the wars. I loved it. (Kate Colquhoun, author of Mr Briggs' Hat and Did She Kill Him?)
If you are inclined to regard the “Golden Age” detective stories as obviously a fantasy form — and never more fantastic than when the sleuth is a woman, Susannah Stapleton’s book will astound you. “Maud West” was a real woman detective, but her story blurs the margin between possible truth and impossible invention till your head spins. If you are susceptible to Miss Marple and Harriet Vane you must read The Adventures of Maud West. You will never know the difference between fact and fiction again. (Jill Paton Walsh, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey-Harriet Vane novels)
Compulsively absorbing . . . delightfully well written, with both sympathy and empathy; it is jaunty, engaging and witty without being arch. A triumph. (Lucy Lethbridge)
[A] charming light-hearted investigation into the life of Maud West, a lady detective. A sort of “Miss Marple on the trail of Miss Marple” . . . frank and funny. (Ysenda Maxtone-Graham)
Intriguing
Impressive . . . more fascinating than any fictional detective story
Highly entertaining
Susannah Stapleton’s erudite but hugely entertaining debut is a true-life detective story about a true-life detective . . . [an] exhilarating eye-opener of a book
Although Stapleton does not engage in much literal leg-work – she is able to do a lot of her research in her pyjamas – this account of her pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisp-like Maud through the maze of online archives and registries is utterly enthralling, often even thrilling
Shot at in Paris, blackmailed in Bloomsbury: the self-promoting cases, and many faces, of a fearless female sleuth . . . breezy
This romp through the life of one of Britain’s first female detectives sets out to solve one central mystery: who was Maud West? Her story is told in tantalising detail by Susannah Stapleton
Fascinating
A gripping read
All stars
Most relevant
Detailed account of the researching of the life of London’s leading lady detective. Chapters are neatly interspersed with stories written by the lady herself. Really interesting with lots of information about life in London in the early twentieth century and discussion on how accurate Maud’s tales of herself may have been.

Well researched study of an interesting woman

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I bought this book to learn about a lady detective and found myself both absorbed in her story and even more so, the story of the author researching and writing about the lady detective.

It is a wonderful book that lets the reader or listener experience the investigation by a modern day lady detective into one of the First Lady detectives. I felt myself drawn to and invested in both stories and all the time I was also getting a social commentary on the late 1800s and early 1900s, but without having to plough through some hard to read social commentary. This social commentary was told using blackmail, guns, deception and pure wit.

I really loved this book.

A lady detective writing about a lady detective.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very interesting book. Glad I got it. Quite a conveluted story but really enthralling. I was quite hooked and ended up sitting in the car listening to the next chapter rather than go in and made tea!

What an intersting woman

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thoroughly entertaining, although Maude West turns out to be an ambivalent heroine! Follows a thin seam of newspaper clippings to strike gold in a motherlode of fascinating and entertaining tales, true, truish, and definitley not true, of blackmailers, petty thieves, and scam artists in 20s London. Golden Age mystery fans should love this look at the unglamorous world of actual private detectives, along with real-life society scandals and murders. I loved the shoutouts to Christie, Sayers et al in the chapter titles!

This reminded me of another of my favourite Audibles, "The Ark Before Noah"-- an in-depth history of a subject I wouldn't think I was interested in, made lively by being told in candid and funny first-person by the historian whose discoveries we follow along with. Read mostly by the author in a listenable dead-pan.

Wonderful, a must for Golden-Age detective fans

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Another historical character i can't believe I never heard of.

Not only a well written biography of an incredibly interesting woman but even better a window into the world she inhabited and the history she lived through.

So much more than the title suggests

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews