Thomas W. Hanshew

• Born: 1857
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: March 3, 1914
• Place of death: London, England

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Hamilton Cleek, 1910-1925

Contribution

The saga of Hamilton Cleek in many ways summarizes the forms of popular literature of the era just before World War I. Thomas W. Hanshew used elements of the crook story and the Balkan romance and combined them with tales featuring an infallible sleuth to produce some of the most extraordinary detective stories of the era. Hanshew’s inventiveness in plotting and his love of the bizarre and exotic influenced later writers, especially Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr.

Biography

Thomas W. Hanshew’s writing life divides into two sections. Until the turn of the century, when at the age of about forty-three he moved from his native United States to England, he had made a living as a writer of melodramas for the stage and as a prolific author of dime and nickel novels. Beginning in the late 1870’s, Hanshew contributed sensational romances to the story paper Young Men of America, and some of these tales were reprinted in dime-novel format. According to dime-novel expert J. Randolph Cox, Hanshew used many pseudonyms, some of which were house names, including Old Cap Collier, Dashing Charley, Old Cap Darrell, H. O. Cooke, Charlotte May Kingsley, R. T. Emmett, and a U.S. Detective. He may have been one of the many authors who wrote as Bertha M. Clay in a series of the most popular, though saccharine, romances of the era.

The second phase of his life began when he moved to England with his wife and daughter. Almost immediately, his first clothbound book, The World’s Finger: An Improbable Story (1901), was published, to be followed by other novels that emphasized mystery and detection, though Hanshew always tried to have something for everybody and therefore included romance, adventure, and an occasional anarchist. His stories also appeared in popular fiction magazines such as Cassell’s, The Red Magazine, and The Story-Teller.

In 1910, when he was in his fifties, Hanshew hit his vein of gold with the publication of The Man of the Forty Faces, the first book about Hamilton Cleek. It was followed by more than fifty short stories and a series of Edison silent films, featuring Thomas Meighan as Cleek. Hanshew died in 1914, but his wife and daughter continued the series based at first on Hanshew’s notes and retaining his name as author and later as coauthor with his wife, Mary E. Hanshew. The final two volumes of Cleek’s adventures, published in the 1930’s, were credited solely to his daughter, Hazel Phillips Hanshew.

Analysis

The turn of the century was an extraordinary time in popular fiction, when stories of detectives, criminals, magicians, living mummies, space invaders, and romantic adventurers took the public’s fancy in books and in magazines. Types of popular fiction were not always distinct, and some authors seem consciously to have made a determination about what sold, combining as many popular elements as possible into a single book. Richard Marsh, for example, realized that both detective stories and occult mysteries had large audiences, so in The Beetle (1897) he set an aristocratic detective to investigate the case of a man who literally turns himself into an insect.

The World’s Finger

Thomas W. Hanshew’s The World’s Finger, accurately subtitled “An Improbable Story,” brings together several elements from popular fiction of the period. Especially in its declamatory dialogue, it reveals Hanshew’s training as a dime novelist in the United States, but he included a number of comments expressing the prejudices of his adopted country: “That’s the worst of you Continental people,” cries one of the characters, “you squeal and howl when the jig’s up and you find yourselves in a corner.”

The plot of The World’s Finger reflects the vogue for the detective stories of Fergus Wright Hume. As in Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and The Chinese Jar (1893), the suspense is created by the competition between rival detectives. In The World’s Finger, Scotland Yard superintendent Maverick Narkom, who plays the heavy through much of the book, opposes private detective George Yardley, who had resigned from the police because of his hatred of the overbearing Narkom. Narkom is in love with the heroine, who has accepted the proposal of a nobleman. When his rival is charged with murder, Narkom seizes the chance and promises to track down the real criminal in exchange for the heroine’s hand in marriage. One of Narkom’s nasty characteristics is that he is prejudiced against the aristocracy, for he has the features of an aristocrat but is of low birth. Hanshew, however, admired those of high birth and disliked those who spent their lives in “workshops [which] vomited their hordes of wage-workers out on the muddy pavement.” The major exception was the Cockney, whom Hanshew found good for a bit of comedy.

Though the social positions in The World’s Finger are backward-looking, the cleverness of Hanshew’s plotting hints at what would come with the Golden Age two decades later. The book begins with the discovery of a corpse, from which lead the bare footprints of the murderer, but the footprints stop at a blank wall. A diamond shirt-link is also found, leading to the strange image of an upper-class murderer in evening dress but wearing no shoes or socks, a murderer who, moreover, can disappear when he reaches a wall. To make matters more mysterious, the body of one of the constables investigating the case is found, yet there seems to be no way for the murderer to have come and gone without being seen. These problems are solved quite quickly by an inventive explanation that would be used by later writers, especially Thomas Burke in “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole.” More mysteries appear, however, some of them concerning inheritance. Hanshew mentions M. E. Braddon in the book, and it is clear that her sensational novels contributed this emphasis on family rights. When a bit more than one-third of the book has been told, the complexities have become so great that one of the characters laments, “Upon my word it is the most mysterious affair of which I have ever heard. It doubles and twists and contradicts itself at every turn.” The detection at this stage is done by a young woman, and her deductions are far cleverer and more persuasive than those of the bemused men about her.

Had the book maintained this level, it would have become one of the classics of detective fiction, but it declines into problems involving identical twins, unnecessary kidnappings, ridiculous police procedure, and (the always popular, at least in 1901) Italian anarchists. Even with its flaws, however, The World’s Finger was successful enough that Hanshew followed with similar novels; the work also helps the modern reader understand Hanshew’s strengths and weaknesses. His willingness to toss almost anything into a plot makes his books marvelous examples of popular culture, but when his tales reach novel length, they form a gooey mishmash.

“The Amethyst Pin”

Hanshew’s major strength was in his plots, especially his imaginative openings with impossibilities. This skill was best displayed in his short stories. In 1905, for example, George Yardley reappeared in “The Amethyst Pin,” a detective story published in The Monthly Story Magazine. Once again, Hanshew used his favorite elements—identical twins, snobbish social attitudes, and (replacing the mysterious Italians) a mysterious Russian. The plot is surprisingly tight, however, with a single focus—the question of identity—and some convincing detection. Using the short-story form, Hanshew was able to make the highly improbable seem believable.

The Man of the Forty Faces

According to a statement at the end of The Man of the Forty Faces, Hamilton Cleek appeared as a character in a stage play a year or two before he was first featured in book form. Hanshew had written melodramas as a young man, and the period before World War I was a time of detective plays, especially Sherlock Holmes (1899), by William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle. Certainly the Cleek of the books resembles the stage version of Holmes, with his dramatic revelations and his pouncing on the criminals, handcuffs ready. Hanshew followed with a series of short stories, twelve of which were collected in 1910 as The Man of the Forty Faces.

A brief summary of how Hamilton Cleek puts his services to the use of Scotland Yard will indicate the flavor of the Cleek stories, especially in Hanshew’s eclectic borrowing of elements from various forms of popular fiction. After a brief opening scene, The Man of the Forty Faces introduces a challenge from the Vanishing Cracksman to Superintendent Maverick Narkom of Scotland Yard. (Narkom has lost the hatred of aristocrats that he had in The World’s Finger; he has also lost what little intelligence he demonstrated in the book.) The Cracksman announces that he will steal diamonds from Sir Horace Wyvern’s wedding party no matter what steps the police take to stop him. He succeeds, but instead of disappearing with the booty he agrees to return it in exchange for an interview with Narkom and Sir Horace. At this meeting, the Cracksman explains that he has become a thief because of his birthgift: “His features seemed to writhe and knot and assume in as many moments a dozen different aspects.” One glance at Sir Horace’s niece, Ailsa Lorne, however, has persuaded him to offer his intelligence and ability at disguise to Scotland Yard. In prose reminiscent of his days writing dime-novel romances as Charlotte May Kingsley, Hanshew has Cleek explain that “I’m tired of wallowing in the mire. A woman’s eyes have lit the way to heaven for me. I want to climb up to her, to win her, to be worthy of her, and to stand beside her in the light.” He then asks Sir Horace, an expert on brain diseases (whose methods prove to be phrenology), to examine his skull. Sir Horace announces that his cranium shows that he must remain a thief. The Cracksman refuses to accept that fate and promises to become a detective, helping Scotland Yard with its riddles. Narkom agrees.

The Cracksman refuses to reveal his true name; he is only “The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek.” He does, however, admit that he had been a thief in France, associated with Margot, queen of the French Apaches. In most of the Cleek books, Margot and her henchmen try to capture Cleek and make him return to his life of crime. In addition, a mysterious group of men from the Balkan kingdom of Mauravania, led by Count Irma, also threaten Cleek. Eventually, Hanshew reveals that Cleek is in reality the true prince of Mauravania, and his subjects want him and his multitude of faces back home.

Hanshew decided that Cleek should begin his career as a cracksman because of the success of gentleman burglars in such books as E. W. Hornung’s The Amateur Cracksman (1899), Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers (1900), and Barry Pain’s The Memoirs of Constantine Dix (1905). Hanshew’s innovation was to turn the thief into a detective, something that had been hinted at but not yet fully developed in Maurice Leblanc’s stories of Arsène Lupin. Cleek as a detective is based directly on Sherlock Holmes. In reaction to Holmes’s eccentricity, many authors of the period described their fictional sleuths as ordinary in appearance. Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Paul Beck, Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, and C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke are the sort that no one would look at twice. Such restraint was not for Hanshew. Cleek, like Holmes, is vivid because of his quirks. Cleek loves flowers, he peppers his talk with music-hall jokes, and when he notices a clue overlooked by Narkom, a queer, one-sided smile appears on his face.

Cleek’s Mauravanian origins are yet another borrowing. With the publication of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark (1901), romances set in nonexistent Balkan principalities had become very popular. In these novels, manly Britishers or Americans with plenty of derring-do solve difficulties—generally concerning succession to the throne—in old-fashioned kingdoms. In the Cleek stories, the formula is inverted. Because he has all the characteristics of a manly Britisher, Cleek refuses to return with Count Irma and instead makes a life in Great Britain, where Ailsa Lorne awaits.

This extraordinary combination of cracksman-detective-Balkan prince solves cases that are often improbable but always ingenious. When Narkom asks Cleek to investigate a riddle, the reader can be certain that it is no ordinary problem. In Cleek’s world, corpses are constantly found in locked rooms with no way for the murderer to have entered or exited, or so it seems until Cleek presents an extraordinary explanation. Only Cleek can discover how a man turned a somersault and disappeared into thin air. Only Cleek can solve the riddle of the corpse with nine fingers. Only Cleek can determine how valuable papers vanished from a locked room that was sheathed with steel plates. Cleek alone knows, almost at a glance, how an Asian idol can dispense death to anyone who dares stay overnight with it.

Many of Cleek’s cases have solutions that are as imaginative and bizarre as the seeming impossibility with which they begin. Almost any object in a Cleek case can hide poison: a soda siphon, a boomerang, a notebook, an alcohol lamp, and even the wings of a moth. Murderers are as much masters of disguise as Cleek himself, though they lack his “weird birthgift.” One criminal, who happens to be a midget, disguises himself as a baby; another works a locked-room trick by making witnesses believe that he is a piece of statuary. Cleek resolves riddles by showing how a murderer can descend through a skylight on a balloon and how jewels can impossibly disappear by being secreted in the pouch of a kangaroo.

Even though few writers would have dared imitate Hanshew’s cheerfully improbable solutions, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and others read the Cleek saga during their formative years and learned much from Hanshew’s ingenious plots. Carr wrote to Queen that “if you told me a new Cleek story had been discovered, I would rather read that story than any discovery except a new story about Father Brown.” Like Hanshew, Carr and Queen often began their cases with a seemingly inexplicable situation and then explained everything through a brilliant detective. Hanshew is seldom read anymore, and his sleuths seem unalterably part of another era, but The Man of the Forty Faces was one of the most important influences on the Golden Age detective story of the 1920’s and the 1930’s.

Principal Series Characters:

• The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek was born the true prince of the fictional Balkan kingdom of Mauravania, but at the opening of the stories about him, he has become the
• Vanishing Cracksman , an associate of Margot, queen of the French Apaches. He is successful as a thief because of his “weird birthgift”: He can make his face assume the features of other people. Consequently, he is called “the man of the forty faces.” After falling in love, however, he reforms, putting his talents at the service of Scotland Yard.
• Ailsa Lorne is the incredibly pure woman with whom Cleek falls in love.
• Dollops is Cleek’s Cockney servant and assistant, the inventor of an unusual method of stopping crooks: He lays gummed paper in their paths, and while they are extricating their feet from the mess, they are arrested by the detectives.
• Superintendent Maverick Narkom represents Scotland Yard. He is continually asking Cleek for help in solving “riddles” and is continually astonished by Cleek’s ability to find the solutions to them.

Bibliography

Cox, J. Randolph. “Cleek and His Forty Faces: Or, T. W. Hanshew, a Dime Novelist Who Made Good.” Dime Novel Round-Up 42 (March/April, 1973): 30-34, 41-43. Brief biography of Hanshew emphasizing the popularity and success of his most famous character.

Greene, Douglas G. “The Incredible Hamilton Cleek: Or, Sherlock Holmes from Graustark.” The Poisoned Pen 5 (November/December, 1982): 11-14. Compares Cleek to Conan Doyle’s famous master sleuth.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins, as well as its function within American culture. Provides perspective on Hanshew’s work.

Sampson, Robert. Glory Figures. Vol 1. in Yesterday’s Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983. The first of six volumes focused on pulp fiction’s most interesting and influential characters. Sheds light on Hanshew’s novels.