Odd People

As head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, Basil Thomson was responsible for hunting, arresting and interrogating possible spies identified by the nascent British intelligence services before the First World War. In Odd People, he recalled the hysteria of his age, rocked by exuberant spy-scares provoked by German aggression in the build-up to war and by those within the British establishment who sought to manipulate popular panic. Speakers in Parliament claimed that there were 80,000 Germans working in Britain's railway stations and hotels just waiting to reinforce an imagined invasion army. The Daily Mail helpfully instructed its readers that they should 'refuse to be served by a German waiter'. Against this backdrop, Thomson himself was an Edwardian novelty; a real-life Sherlock Holmes, to whom he compared himself - though he thought his own caseload far more interesting than any of Conan Doyle's fictional sleuth. He opens his book by asserting that any detective so drastically reliant upon drugs and tobacco as Holmes would most likely end up arresting a bishop by mistake. Odd People is a compendium of the marvellous specimens he tracked and interrogated in those extraordinary times, most famous among them the exotic dancer, courtesan and spy, Mata Hari. Above all, this extraordinary memoir is a wittily observed portrait of an incomparably exciting job at a time of great national crisis and paranoia. As such it is a fascinating document.