A. E. W. Mason

Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was born on 7 May 1865 in Camberwell. He studied at Dulwich College and graduated from Trinity College, Oxford, in 1888. He was an actor before he became a writer, and in 1894 he played Major Plechanoff in the first production of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. He was also a keen cricketer.

Arthur Quiller-Couch and Oscar Wilde encouraged him to write, and his first novel, A Romance of Wastdale, came out in 1895. He went on to write more than 30 books, as well as plays, short stories and articles. In 1906 he was elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Coventry, and served a single term. In the First World War he served with the Manchester Regiment and then the Royal Marine Light Infantry, and worked in naval intelligence in Spain and Mexico, setting up counter-espionage networks for the British government.

His best-known book is The Four Feathers (1902), a novel of courage and cowardice in wartime. It was filmed several times, including a 1939 version shot on location in Sudan. In At the Villa Rose (1910) he introduced Inspector Hanaud of the French Sûreté, a detective he set out to make as different as possible from Sherlock Holmes. The book was a best-seller, and Hanaud was an early template for Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.

Later in life Mason also wrote non-fiction, including a biography of Sir Francis Drake in 1941. He was working on a book about Admiral Robert Blake when he died in 1948.

Sources: wikipedia.org