The Riddle of the Frozen Flame

The Riddle of the Frozen Flame is a mystery novel by Mary E. Hanshew (d. 1927) and her husband Thomas W. Hanshew (1857-1914), the writing team behind the considerable Hamilton Cleek detective series of the early twentieth century. The Cleek stories began as solo work by Thomas Hanshew in 1910 and continued under Mary Hanshew’s authorship and the joint by-line after his 1914 death.

Hamilton Cleek, sometimes called the Man of the Forty Faces for his theatrical disguise abilities, was a London consulting detective whose cases combined the standard Edwardian and Georgian mystery plot conventions with the disguise and impersonation material that gave the series its distinctive character. Cleek had been a master criminal before his reform, and the tension between his criminal background and his detective work provided ongoing dramatic interest across the series.

The Frozen Flame mystery uses a particular eerie phenomenon as the central puzzle. The Cleek novels were widely read in their time and contributed to the wide body of Edwardian and Georgian English detective fiction produced alongside the better-remembered Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown stories.