The idea of a lady detective in disguise particularly captured the journalists’ imagination. Almost all of them homed in on this, revealing that she had been known to dress up as a charwoman, a gypsy, a nurse, a fortune teller and, as the Adelaide Saturday Journal reported in 1926, as a man:
[Maud West] has successfully occupied rooms at a fashionable hotel as a titled Englishman, and has followed her suspects into their clubs, has played baccarat beside them at the Monte Carlo Casino, and no one has suspected that the young person in silk hat and evening clothes was a woman …8
Maud West made occasional attempts to counter all this by explaining the day-to-day reality of her job: ‘There is nothing mysterious or miraculous about the way I find out things. The whole secret is in the application of practical common sense. And the only motto for the successful detective is – Keep on trying.’9 She said that the simplest disguises were often the best (‘a pair of heavy earrings make me look frightfully common’), and explained the skill and experience needed for accurate observation.10 Above all, she emphasized the hard work involved: ‘A strong constitution is absolutely essential. One frequently has to go without meals, and the strain is very severe, for one never knows when one will be able to rest.’11
But the newspapers wanted thrills and spills, as was most evident in a particularly colourful set of articles I found in the Australian press. I had gone looking for tabloid journalism and I’d found it, only this wasn’t the Daily Mail or the Daily Mirror; this was worse. According to the small print, many of these articles had been syndicated from a British magazine called Pearson’s Weekly. Just seeing the name made my heart sink.
Journalistic integrity didn’t even make it onto the agenda at Pearson’s Weekly. Ever since it first appeared in the late nineteenth century, it had one mission: to make money. It was brazen in its pursuit of the Sunday reader, that downtrodden soul desperate for a few hours’ respite from the daily grind, and a good chunk of the paper’s income came from its legendary competitions which, along with the numerous advertisements, were designed to appeal to fantasies of a better life. There were pages of them every week with prizes ranging from briar pipes to houses and husbands, open to all on payment of a small fee. Everything else was just filler.
I even had some copies on my shelves, bound into a hefty volume covering 1934, which I had purchased purely for entertainment. The paper’s motto was ‘To Interest, to Elevate, to Amuse.’ You couldn’t fault it on interest and amusement, but elevation? Leafing through its pages, it was hard to find any actual news, unless you counted such pressing matters as ‘What Has Happened to the Loch Ness Monster?’ and ‘Is Wireless Giving You A Sixth Sense?’ Fiction, sport, celebrities and humour featured heavily, and there was also a fair amount of true crime: a behind-the-scenes series about Scotland Yard, for example, and a feature on Cairo’s Narcotics Intelligence Bureau. Cautionary tales scattered throughout each issue warned of killer swans, luggage thieves, motor bandits and cheese smugglers.
I could see that this last batch of articles I had found about Maud West would have been the perfect match for Pearson’s Weekly. They had dramatic headlines:
Some were accompanied by lurid illustrations:
As for the articles themselves, they described Maud West undertaking a series of adventures wilder than any I had imagined. I’d thought she might have been caught snooping in the wrong place occasionally, maybe even had a run-in with a disgruntled criminal or two, but these tales were something else. They took her from the slums of Whitechapel to smart Paris hotels, to New York’s Lower East Side and the backstreets of Buenos Aires, all on the trail of a cast of characters that included runaway heiresses, defrocked vicars, amateur surgeons and continental blackmailers. The baddies carried guns and knives, and said things like ‘Good heavens, we are nobbled.’12
The Maud West depicted in these articles was a woman of many parts. In some stories she was the feisty heroine, skulking about in the underworld and relentlessly chasing her prey until victory was hers. In others, she appeared as a kindly yet strict mother figure, sorting out troubled love affairs with calm authority. In a few, she played an almost comic role, diving under rugs and squeezing into tight spaces to avoid detection. One caper even included a follow-that-cab! sequence.
They were completely over the top, but there were no protests from Maud about their accuracy, no attempts to counter the sensationalism or put the record straight. The reason for this was simple:
She had written them herself.
What to make of it all? On the one hand, Maud West was a genuine detective, and a successful one at that. She was a businesswoman, a member of the brisk-sounding Efficiency Club, and had enjoyed a career lasting over thirty years. On the other, she was a hack writer churning out ‘true’ adventure stories for the gutter press. It was possible that the two overlapped, but, if so, at what point did fact turn into fiction?
I cleared the kitchen table and laid out her articles, shifting them around as I thought things through. At one end of the table I placed those which were believable: a case in which she had to retrieve a letter sent in error, for example, and a story about an innocuous, if complicated, love triangle. At the other end were those which tested the limits of credulity, such as a chase across the Atlantic that ended with Maud in a Brazilian drugs factory, jotting down the recipe for cocaine. Where did I draw the line? Did it go before or after any revolvers were drawn? Was dropping a sleeping draught into a suspect’s coffee improbable or merely illegal? And how did I feel about Chinamen, that cliché of bad detective fiction?
I was torn between discounting the whole lot and arguing myself into a place where anything was possible. The more outrageous tales were unlikely to be representative of her daily life, but could they be highlights of a long and strange career? She had existed in a different time, after all, one that was less regulated and more conducive to adventure. Even my own grandmother had once been kidnapped by pirates in the North China Sea as a child, and she hadn’t even been looking for trouble. Maud West was paid to seek it out and poke about in places that were best left unpoked. Viewed in that light, were her stories really so implausible?
Then it struck me. Caught up in all the drama, I’d missed the most obvious point of all. Of course the stories couldn’t be true. Not word-for-word true, anyway. Libel laws aside, detective work involved sorting out personal problems and making embarrassing or awkward situations go away, those ‘delicate matters’ mentioned in her advert. The last thing Maud or her clients would have wanted was for the details to be splashed all over the papers. Her career would have been over before it had started.
So, why had she written them? Did she need the money? Was her work poorly paid? It seemed unlikely. Wealthy people in desperate situations would pay as much as was required to get things resolved, and there were clearly enough of them around for her to maintain a central London office and, if her adverts were to be believed, a body of staff. Was it a way of advertising? If so, it can’t have been very effective. Her prospective clients wouldn’t have been the sort to read Pearson’s Weekly. I imagined they would stick to the broadsheets: The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Manchester Guardian. Besides, even if they had come across one of her stories, it would hardly have inspired confidence in her discreet professionalism.
Maybe that hypodermic needle and vial of dope in her overnight bag provided a clue. I’d assumed they were tools of her trade, there for protection alongside the revolver, but what if she was blowing all her money on drugs? Had she got a taste for gambling in the casinos of Monte Carlo? Was she being blackmailed? Or did she just crave the attention, a trait that must have put her at a disadvantage in a profession where discretion was key?
I had no idea. But something didn’t add up.
I decided to put Maud’s stories aside for the time being and look again at the more straightforward evidence I had found in the overseas newspapers. A few hints enabled me to work out that she had set up her detective agency in
1905. Assuming that she had been a young woman when she had gone on her first, tentative sleuthing mission, and that it had taken her a few years to gain enough experience and confidence to go into business on her own, I figured that she must have been born sometime around 1880.
According to the 1911 census on ancestry.co.uk, there were nearly 300 people called Maud West in England at that time, not one of whom claimed to be a private detective. If I narrowed it down to those born in 1880, give or take five years, there were still over seventy, although only twenty of those lived in London. It didn’t sound like many, but, without more information to go on, I’d need to start drafting family trees for each one, looking for the ‘solicitor relation’ mentioned in the Perth Daily News – a brother? a cousin? a grandfather? – and hope for the best. And that was assuming that Maud was there at all; she might have been working abroad on the night of the census. It seemed wise to wait for more clues before I started delving into her background.
On a more positive note, I had found a description of Maud. It had appeared in the Adelaide Express and Telegraph in 1914 and, to my relief, didn’t describe a glamorous femme fatale decked out in scarlet lipstick and a low-brimmed hat, as in the illustrations that accompanied some of her articles. She sounded refreshingly normal:
… Miss West is in appearance just a typical sturdy, athletic Englishwoman. Light brown hair, frank brown eyes, and a healthy complexion, all spoke of one who lived, or ought to live, an out-of-door, fresh air life. And this is probably one of the secrets of her success as a detective. She is just like so many other ordinary, middle-class English girls …13
By my calculations, she would have been in her early thirties at the time, so hardly a girl, but the fact that she was solidly middle class made sense if there was a solicitor in the family and Maud had been at leisure to practise her sleuthing skills before taking up the work professionally. I also wondered if her background was another clue as to why she went into business at all: however much her family loved her, a presumably unmarried daughter could be a financial burden. Maybe they had been keen to marry her off, and maybe, for whatever reason, Maud didn’t want that.
By this point, I was itching to see a photograph of her. I wanted to look into those frank brown eyes and get the measure of her, but it was proving difficult. I’d received an email from Manchester Archives saying that the first photo I had requested would be delayed as they were reorganizing their storerooms, and I’d searched other archives catalogues and photographic agencies without success. As a last resort, I’d set up an eBay alert, which so far had only produced hundreds of twee dog postcards by the Edwardian artist Maud West Watson.
Then, one day, amidst all the terriers and poodles, there was a young man:
It was another press photograph, and it had a date: 22 February 1922. Heaven knows where it had been for the past ninety or so years – when it arrived through my letterbox, it was stained and battered and gave off a weird, formaldehyde-like tang – but at some point a sub-editor had daubed on a bit of white gouache and touched up the eyes, nostrils and cigarette with ink. The scribbles and stamps on the back attributed it to the New York offices of a London photographic agency. There was also a faded label:
LONDON’S PREMIER LADY DETECTIVE
Miss Maud West, London’s only woman detective, has made quite a name for herself as a Sherlock Holmes …
So, this was Maud. Would I have bought a newspaper from her or walked past without a glance as she skulked in a doorway? Maybe. Was this her normal get-up? I couldn’t discount the possibility that she preferred men’s clothing, but the caption also stated that she was in ‘mannish make-up’, so I went with the idea that she was demonstrating her disguise skills. It was certainly attention-grabbing. In 1922, with the Jazz Age under way, cross-dressing wasn’t unheard of, but it still had the capacity to shock the good people of Middle England.
Looking beyond the clothes, she was plumper than expected, but her overall appearance matched the description from the Adelaide Express and Telegraph. How old was she here? Forty? She hid it well. She hid a lot of things well. Her eyes, for example, were giving nothing away: they stared into the middle distance, refusing to meet my gaze. Despite that, Maud West suddenly felt very real. I couldn’t imagine what strapping and corsetry was going on beneath her waistcoat, but underneath that there was a beating heart. Maud West wasn’t just a lady detective; she was a living, breathing human being, full of complexities and anxieties and private passions. Who did she love? What did she fear? After the photograph was taken did she burst out laughing and whip off that ridiculous hat, or did she stand up, straighten her tie and ask for a light? Who was she?
The questions were piling up and I was no closer to finding any answers. It was time to head out and do some proper research. I needed to find the original articles that Maud had written, but there might also be case files or appointment books hidden away somewhere. I knew she had staff. Who were they? Perhaps one of them had left a diary or some letters behind. I could check the Home Office records at the National Archives to see if she had ever worked with the police, and look through ships’ passenger lists for details of any trips abroad. Her revolver would have required a firearms certificate and, if the relevant register had survived, that might offer up a home address.
There were plenty of ways I could start building a picture of Maud’s life and work, but first I wanted to settle a question that had been niggling at the back of my mind. Although many of the sources I had found stated that she was London’s only woman detective, others had used the words leading and foremost. That suggested there were others. If so, who were they? And was Maud West really in a class of her own, or was it all just hype?
The Creeping Tiger
BY MAUD WEST
The facts were these. A certain well-known hostess asked me soon after the war to try to recover a packet of letters which had been taken from her private bureau. She did not suspect anyone, nor had she been blackmailed, but she confessed that if the letters fell into unscrupulous hands ‘there would be the dickens to pay.’
‘I have not had a moment’s peace of mind since the letters went,’ she continued. ‘I do not suspect my husband, because he is totally ignorant of my foolishness. It all happened while he was on active service. Prompted, I suppose, by sympathy, I had become friendly with a man who was badly wounded. Our friendship ripened quickly and we wrote to each other. He died before the war ended. I kept his letters. Now they have gone.’
The problem she had set me did not seem easy to solve, but by persistent questioning I learned, after my third visit to her, that among her callers about the time the letters vanished was a man whom, before her marriage, she had jilted. He had been deeply in love with her at the time, and they had remained good friends.
Certain other circumstances which confirmed my suspicions caused me to try to make the man’s acquaintance. I learned that though he had a fine flat he lived mostly at a West End hotel. The next morning saw me booked at the hotel, where I arranged with the head waiter to sit at a table facing my quarry. On the fifth day he smiled and with a courtly bow greeted me with a quiet ‘Good morning.’ I acknowledged his greeting smilingly and, after some customary remark about the weather, we discussed the news of the day.
This went on for several days, and then, with unexpected suddenness, he invited me to lunch. After a moment’s hesitation I accepted. Later, to my dismay, he asked me to dine at his flat. I was getting heartily tired of the slowness of my inquiries, and in desperation I agreed. Before going there I arranged for two male assistants to be within earshot.
The dinner was splendidly prepared and set by his manservant, yet I did not feel as light-hearted as I appeared. With liqueurs and coffee we settled in front of a cosy fire in comfortable armchairs and talked about many foreign countries I had visited. At his request I accepted a second liqueur. This was my great moment, the one I had been playing for. As he went over to a cabinet to pour out the drinks, I skilfully drop
ped a sleeping draught into his coffee.
My nerves were strained to breaking point. Would he suspect the coffee? Would I have to rush to the window and call for help? Would my plans all fall to pieces? The seconds seemed like hours, and then with some casual remark he drank the lot! Very soon he relaxed and fell into a drugged sleep.
My actions now had to be very swift and silent, because I had to reckon on the possible return of the valet. In a corner of the room was a desk which had interested me all the evening. Fortunately it was unlocked. Quickly pulling the lid down, I made a thorough search and, to my delight, found the missing packet of letters.
In my haste and excitement I let the lid of the desk fall with what seemed a terrific crash. My heart stood still as I saw the sleeping man move. What was I to do if he awoke? Suddenly I dropped on my hands and knees and crawled under a huge tiger skin rug on the floor. I can only explain my action as being impelled by the elemental idea of hiding in the face of danger. Anyhow, having got under the rug, I crawled underneath it to the door, grabbed my hat and coat, and dashed into the street.
Next day, after returning the letters to my client, I paid another visit to my sleepy host. He was somewhat shame-faced and apologised for his unseemly conduct in falling to sleep. Edging towards the door I told him why I had accepted his invitation to dinner, how I had taken a packet of letters from his desk, and how I had crawled to the door under the rug. He did not seem to mind losing the letters at all. He said he had taken them in a stupid moment and had not intended to make use of them. But he thanked his stars that he did not wake up while that tiger was moving.14
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 2
