Thomas W. Hanshew

Born in Brooklyn in 1857, Thomas W. Hanshew built a varied career as both an actor and a writer. Before becoming widely known for crime fiction, he worked in the theater and wrote melodramas and popular fiction, experience that shows in the dramatic pacing and colorful disguises found in his later books.

He is most closely associated with Hamilton Cleek, the master criminal turned detective known as "the Man of the Forty Faces." Many of those novels appeared in the early 1900s, after Hanshew had settled in England, and they helped make him a familiar name to readers of mystery and sensation fiction.

Hanshew also collaborated with his wife, Mary E. Hanshew, and his work remained in circulation long after his death in 1914, with many titles later preserved by Project Gutenberg. A confirmed portrait image was not available from the sources I checked, so no profile image is included here.