It’s time female fraudsters received their due

If you’re after jewel thieves, bank robbers and gold smugglers, look no further than Caitlin Davies’s Queens of the Underworld. It opens in 1960 and tells the tale of Zoe Progl, a professional crook who once stole £250,000-worth of furs in a single heist. Eventually sent to Holloway Prison for 20 years, Progl subsequently pulled off the most successful jailbreak in 75 years when she scaled the 25ft wall to freedom.

Davies describes how her interest in this case led her to talk to Progl’s daughter after her mother’s death and, realising there was barely any public knowledge about this notorious, successful and imaginative criminal, thought that Progl was one of many women who deserved her attention.

In 1990 a gangster’s moll shot her lover to prevent him discovering she had spent his cash while he was inside

Queens of the Underworld is a rollicking account of all kinds of crime committed by women from the 17th century to the present day. Moll Cutpurse operated as a pickpocket in the 1600s, running her criminal empire from Shoe Lane in the City of London, now home to the investment bankers Goldman Sachs. Centuries later, in 2004, Britain’s most notorious fraudster of the modern age, Joyti De-Laurey, was jailed for seven years for stealing £4.5 million from her Goldman Sachs employers, buying 11 properties in the UK, a £750,000 seafront villa in Cyprus, luxury cars, Cartier jewellery and a £150,000 speedboat. Dubbed ‘the Picasso of con artists’, De-Laurey told me in 2005 that she was given a longer sentence than most men convicted of similar crimes because she was a woman who had made the male bankers she had stolen from ‘look like a pair of pricks’.