Meade and Robert Eustace would publish six stories featuring the Madame Sara character between October 1902 and March 1903.
[8] The stories all concern the efforts of Eric Vandeleur, the Police Surgeon of the Westminster area of London, to investigate the eponymous Madame Sara.
In The Talk of the Town, for example, Madame Sara attempts to kill the scientist Professor Piozzi with an alkaloid and carbon monoxide.
[7] Her role as a beautician and cosmetologist also highlights the fear of modern medical science present in Edwardian England.
Her clinic is depicted as a strange and sinister place, full of alarming medical instruments that reflect contemporary anxieties towards chloroform and anaesthesia.
Christopher Pittard has argued that this can be read as a parody of determinist criminology, wherein the forensic evidence of the crime is artificially administered by the "detective" figure.