The female private detective has been a staple of popular culture for over 150 years. But what about the real-life women behind these fictional tales?
Dismissed as 'Mrs Sherlock Holmes' or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since the mid-nineteenth century - everything from theft and fraud to romance scams and murder. In Private Inquiries, Caitlin Davies traces the history of the UK's female investigators. Women like Victorian private inquiry agent Antonia Moser, the first woman to open her own agency and Liverpool sleuth Zena Scott-Archer, who became the first woman president of the World Association of Detectives. Caitlin also follows in the footsteps of her subjects, undertaking a professional qualification to become a Private Investigator. After a century of undercover work, it's time to reveal the secrets of their trailblazing forebears.
Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Ronnie Biggs, the Krays. . .All have become folk heroes, glamorised and romanticised, even when they killed. But where are their female equivalents? Where are the street robbers, gang leaders, diamond thieves, gold smugglers and bank robbers? Queens of the Underworld reveals the incredible story of female crooks from the 17th century to the present. From Moll Cutpurse to the Black Boy Alley Ladies, from jewel thief Emily Lawrence to bandit leader Elsie Carey and burglar Zoe Progl, these were charismatic women at the top of their game. But female criminals have long been dismissed as either not 'real women' or not 'real criminals', and in the process their stories have been lost.
In a small Kent town in the 1950s, a bewildered little girl is growing up. Ostracised because of her colour, she tries her best to fit in, but nobody wants anything to do with her.
A nanny climbs the steps of a smart London address. She's convinced that her connection to the family behind the door is more than professional.
And on the walls of an English stately home, amongst the family portraits, hangs an eighteenth-century oil painting of a mysterious black woman in a silk gown.
In ways both poignant and unexpected, the three lives are intertwined in a heartbreaking story of prejudice and motherless children, of chances missed, of war time secrets and the search for belonging...
The first time Annie Sweet sees 43 Stanley Road, the house is so perfect she almost feels as though it has chosen her. But with her husband seeming more distant, and her daughter wrapped up in her friends and new school, Annie is increasingly left alone to mull over the past.
She soon becomes consumed by the house and everyone who has lived there before her, especially a young music hall singer called Lily Painter, whose sparkling performances were the talk of London. As Annie delves further into the past she unravels the case of two notorious baby farmers, who cruelly preyed on vulnerable unmarried mothers. And until she solves the mystery at the heart of the scandal, the ghost of Lily Painter will never be able to rest.
Basing her story on true events, Caitlin Davies skilfully blends fact and fiction to bring to life part of our sinister past. Spanning an entire century, from the journals of an Edwardian police inspector to a doomed wartime love affair, The Ghost of Lily Painter is a gripping and poignant novel.
