Susannah Stapleton - The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime

in all good faith to other women who would become detectives, I would utter one word of advice Dont.

Maud West, 1914

Maybe I should have walked away at the first sign of deceit; after the incident with the bear-skin rug, perhaps, or during that ridiculous car chase across Hampstead Heath. In Paris? Or Rio? There were so many times I could have turned back and just left her to it. But then I would never have met the Countess or the Prince of Lovers, or learned how to rig an office safe with chloroform or whip up a disguise using only a piece of orange peel and a wisp of goat hair. Id never have laughed with her or wept for her; Id never have seen what lay beneath. Besides, Im not sure I even had a choice. There was almost a sense of inevitability about the whole thing.

Looking back, you could say that our paths began to converge on Boxing Day 1984, when the magnificent Joan Hickson, in her first tweedy outing as Miss Marple, pottered into my familys sitting room to investigate The Body in the Library . Just shy of my twelfth birthday, I was immediately and irreparably entranced by the whodunnit, yes, and the frocks, the hats, the gigolos and jazz fiends, but, most of all, by the idea of all those delicious secrets lying so perilously close to the surface. Before long, Id sought out the books for my own private feasts of sparkling cyanide and arsenic-laced prawns, and taken up snooping on the side. By the time I was thirteen, I was eyeing up louche lipstick in the village chemist, sneaking the occasional cigarillo and dabbling in a bit of light blackmail. It was only the threat and subsequent reality of boarding school that put paid to an otherwise promising future as a Jazz Age reprobate.

Somewhere along the way, my talent for muckraking was guided into a career in history, where it was thought I could do less harm. But I never gave up the detective stories. If I learned anything from my two-year incarceration in a ladies college, it was that theres nothing like a good murder to lift the spirits. As the years went on, I put this to good use in what became something of an annual ritual: in the darkest days of winter, Id take a couple of weeks off work, build a nest by the fire and escape into a world of daggers, poisons, wrath and revenge. It never failed to beat away the winter blues. Until, that is, a few years ago.

All the usual elements were in place that winter: miserable weather, a build-up of petty resentments, a stack of green Penguins foraged from second-hand bookshops. Yet, however much I craved that state of rightness-with-the-world, where the bodies are all lined up, someone is on their way to the gallows and a cup of cocoa awaits before bed, I couldnt find a way in. As the first week wore on, a trail of half-read books lay scattered throughout the house, old friends abandoned mid-sentence: Harriet Vane motionless under the bed; Nero Wolfe sliding down the back of the sofa. I couldnt settle to anything.

Instead, my mind kept going back to a historical missing-persons case Id recently completed. It had arisen out of some exhibition work I had done for a museum, and my quarry had been a minor nineteenth-century inventor whose fate had stumped a small band of collectors and enthusiasts for decades. The case had taken me on an exciting jaunt, on paper at least, from Liverpool to Havana, with a small attempted coup in Spain along the way. There had been exploding steamships, secret marriages, royal pardons, family feuds and a sad, gin-pickled end. When I thought about it, Id been feeling a bit flat ever since. I missed the thrill of the chase.