The Devil’s Draper
Glasgow, 1920: Mabel is a statement taker with the police (her gender debars her from being an officer). Beatrice is a war widow and bereaved mother, supporting herself by running an employment agency. Johnnie, who prefers to wear male clothing when she can, is a member of an all-woman gang of thieves, the St Thenue’s Avengers. Gradually, their three narratives interlace, as Beatrice investigates the high turnover of shop assistants in a city centre department store, discovering that the owner, Hector Arrol (a sort of Glaswegian Mohamed al-Fayed) has been sexually assaulting them. Then a young Avenger disappears.
Moore had not intended to write a sequel to her 2023 novel The Unpicking, but this reader is very glad she has (The Devil’s Draper works as a standalone, but I’d recommend reading both). She has also left open the possibility of a trilogy, not least with the establishment of a detective agency in the closing pages.
Moore evokes the vanished world of post-WWI department stores in Glasgow. Arrol’s is invented, but a number of actual emporiums feature, and very grand they were. The details of their wares are beautifully conjured, especially the garments: ‘copper lace over copper ninon, jade silk tricotine, cherry silk net.’ But do not read this in search of costume drama/cosy crime. Moore takes the reader into a world where sexual assaults go unpunished because of the almost impossibly high bar of proof, where a woman wanting a divorce must prove more grounds than would her husband, even if he had shut her up in an asylum for decades while he squandered her money, and where a working-class girl fished from the Clyde is too easily dismissed as a suicide.
Glasgow, the ‘dear, green place’ is here a dark one, and I unreservedly recommend you go there.
