Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having started sleuthing on behalf of Society’s finest in 1905.
With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and continental blackmailers, Stapleton interweaves tales from Maud West’s own casebook with social history and extensive original research. This 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.