The Riddle of the Mysterious Light

The Riddle of the Mysterious Light is a Hamilton Cleek detective novel by Mary E. Hanshew, continuing the popular detective series she wrote alongside her husband Thomas W. Hanshew (1857-1914) and continued under her own name and the joint by-line after his death.

Hamilton Cleek is the central detective figure across the series, a former master criminal whose reform brought his disguise skills and criminal knowledge into the service of law enforcement. His ability to assume different identities at will provided the series with its distinctive Man of the Forty Faces nickname and gave the various mysteries unusual dramatic possibilities compared to more conventional detective stories of the period.

The Mysterious Light puzzle uses an unexplained luminous phenomenon as the central mystery that Cleek must investigate and resolve. The Cleek novels typically combine these supernatural-seeming mysteries with rational explanations that emerge through Cleek’s investigation. The series found a long Anglo-American audience across the 1910s and into the 1920s.