Welcome to Secret Sleuths

A place for anyone interested in the history of British investigators

This is Secret Sleuths, where I look at the history of private detectives - primarily in the United Kingdom, but also venturing overseas on occasion.

I’m a crime historian and writer whose last book was Sister Sleuths: Female Detectives in Britain (Pen & Sword). This book looked at the history of female detectives in Britain from c1850 to 1950, asking whether these ‘sister sleuths’ emerged from after news about the exploits of Kate Warne in America made it into the British newspapers, or whether the existence of early British female detectives was a separate event, the result of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act.

This parliamentary act made it easier to get a divorce - but to get one, you needed to be able to prove adultery (by a wife; a husband had to also be shown to be cruel, for example). Men and women who sought a divorce therefore started to employ private detectives to find evidence of their spouse’s adultery - and it soon became clear that female detectives were better able to inveigle their way into married women’s lives with less suspicion than their male equivalents.

As a result of my research, I started assembling a database of female detectives - but I also included male detectives who I came across during my work. I’ve now amassed a wealth of information about these Victorian, Edwardian and pre-WW2 private detectives - what their backgrounds were, how long they stayed in the industry, where they were based, and what kind of cases they worked on. Secret Sleuths will detail these individuals; you will enjoy if you’re interested in social history and the history of crime, and also if you have a private detective in your family history and want to know more.

In addition, if you’d like to know more about an ancestor who was a private detective, do get in touch, and I’ll see what I can find out!