The Riddle of the Spinning Wheel

The Riddle of the Spinning Wheel is a Hamilton Cleek detective novel by Mary E. Hanshew, continuing the popular Edwardian and Georgian detective series that she and her husband Thomas W. Hanshew (1857-1914) had established. The spinning wheel of the title provides the central puzzle around which the mystery plot develops.

The Cleek series featured the former master criminal Hamilton Cleek, whose reform brought his disguise abilities and criminal knowledge into legitimate detective work. The Man of the Forty Faces nickname referred to his theatrical capacity for impersonation, which the series exploited across many books for both comic and dramatic effect.

The Spinning Wheel mystery uses a particular domestic or mechanical object as the focus of an apparently impossible crime that Cleek must investigate. The Cleek novels generally play fair with the reader in providing enough clues for the eventual solution to be reachable through the same logical reasoning Cleek uses. The series ran across the 1910s and 1920s and was widely read in Britain and America during the period.