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

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The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

By: Susannah Stapleton
Narrated by: Susannah Stapleton, Clare Wille
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About this listen

If you are susceptible to Miss Marple and Harriet Vane you must listen to The Adventures of Maud West.

You will never know the difference between fact and fiction again.

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than 30 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 20th century.

©2019 Susannah Stapleton (P)2019 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd Detective Europe Great Britain Historical True Crime Women Crime Suspenseful England

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All stars
Most relevant  
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

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Maud is a fascinating character. Good insight into women's challenges early in the 20th century.

A very interesting character and a good story

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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

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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.

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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

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Amazing true story, fabulously written and narrated by the author. This was a 'couldn't stop listening' audio if ever I had one!

Fabulous

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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

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this book was unbearable to listen to given the narrator was monotone and put me to sleep

monotone narration

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What could have been an interesting subject is totally spoilt by the decision to allow the author read the book - a really boring reading. Clare Willie reads short extracts in the person of Maud West and is good, but these snippets (sadly) are short. On the text itself the author (in my view) spends too much time on her own investigative methodology at the expense of her subject. Overall a big disappointment.

Spoilt by a poor reading by author

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Dreary tales and is extremely dreary narration
Stuck with it .. wished I hadn’t ... don’t bother

Awful

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