William Carlton Lanyon Dawe, generally known as Carlton Dawe (30 July 1865 – 30 May 1935), was a prolific Australian author of over seventy-seven books including romance, mystery and crime.

Dawe was born in Adelaide

Adelaide

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...

 and came from an old Cornish family. Dawe came to Melbourne with his parents around 1880, and in 1885 published in London Sydonia and other Poems. In 1886 Love and the World and other Poems was published in Melbourne. Although these poems were possibly a little better than average, they did not suggest any particular promise. In the same year he published in Melbourne his first attempt at fiction, Zantha, and in 1889 another volume of poetry, Sketches in Verse, was published in London. The Golden Lake (1891) has been described as a Lemurian

Lemuria (continent)

Lemuria is the name of a hypothetical "lost land" variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept's 19th century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography; however, the concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern theories of plate tectonics...

 novel and is an adventure story based on the search for a cave of gold in Australia, and The Emu's Head (1893) is about the violent Australian gold mines.

Dawe was all his life a traveller, going round the world more than once and lived for a time in Asia, before settling permanently in England from 1892. His work often examined the difficulties of white man's difficulties in settlement of the Far East, and his earlier short stories anticipate Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...

 and Somerset Maugham. Yellow and White (1895) and Kakemonos (1897), are collections of short stories and notes along this line and gave straightforward accounts of interracial sex ("the love of the white for the yellow"). Yellow Man (1900) is a thriller involving Chinese secret societies. The Emu's Head (1893) is about the violent Australian gold mines.

Dawe wrote a few plays; The Black Spider was produced in London in 1927. He also had two plays filmed, The Black Spider (US: Foolish Monte Carlo) in 1920 and The Shadow of Evil in 1921.

Dawe died in London in 1935.

Works

Dawe published more than seventy seven books during his life covering romance, mystery and crime.

• Mount Desolation (1892)
• The Emu's Head (1893)
• The Confessions of a Currency Girl (1894)
• Captain Castle (1897)
• The Yellow Man (1900)
• Claudia Pole (1901)
• Straws in the Wind (1901)
• The Demagague (1902)
• The London Plot (1903)
• The Prime Minister and Mrs. Grantham (1903)
• Lammas Grove (1904)
• The Grand Duke (1905)
• A Morganatic Marriage (1906)
• The Life Perilous (1907)
• Her Highness's Secretary (1907)
• The Plotters of Peking (1907)
• The Confessions of Cleodora (1908)
• One Fair Enemy (1908)
• The Woman, the Man, and the Monster (1909)
• The New Andromeda (1909)
• A Saint in Mufti (1910)
• The Black Spider (1911). Filmed in 1920.
• The Shadow of Evil (1913). Filmed in 1921.
• The Crackswoman (1914)
• The Girl from Nippon (1915)
• The Super Barbarians (1915)

• The Redemption of Grace Milroy (1916)
• The Woman with the Yellow Eyes (1917)
• The Admiralty's Secret (1918)
• The Mighty Arm (1919)
• A Brush with Fate (1920)
• A Tangled Marriage (1921)
• Euryale in London (1922)
• Stranger Than Fiction (1923)
• Virginia (1923)
• Desperate Love (1924)
• The Temptation of Selma (1924)
• The Way of a Maid (1925)
• The Forbidden shrine (1926)
• The Glare (1926)
• The Knightsbridge Affair (1927)
• Slings and Arrows (1927)
• After Many Days (1928)
• Pacific Blue (1928)
• The Desirable Woman (1929)
• The Winding Road (1929)
• The Missing Clue (1930)
• Leathermouth (1931)
• Wanted ! (1931)
• Fifteen Keys (1932)
• Fishers of Men (1932)
• Lawless (1932)

• The Sign of the Glove (1932)
• The Chief (1933)
• Crumpled Lilies (1933)
• The Law of the Knife (1934)
• Leathermouth's Luck (1934)
• The Missing Treaty (1934)
• A Royal Alliance (1935)
• Waste Lands (1935)
• The Green Killer (1936)
• Tough Company (1936)
• Live Cartridge (1937)
• A Strange Destiny (1937)

External links

• Works by or about Carlton Dawe at Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
   (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, second edition, 1994, Oxford University Press
  Oxford University Press
  Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
  
  .
• Dawe, Carlton at AusLit.
• Carlton Dawe at imdb