[5] Dawe began by writing poetry and fiction, then morphed it into thrillers and romances by the end of his career as a writer.
The 1901 England Census records the "author" as residing in Battersea in a house with his unmarried sister Gwendolen, Helen C. Crough (possibly his landlady), her teenage son Charles, and a servant, Alice Warren.
Dawe was a lifelong traveller, journeying around the world more than once and living for a time in Asia, before settling permanently in England from 1892 onwards.
[3] His work often examined the difficulties of a white man's settlement in the Far East, and his earlier short stories anticipate Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham.
[3] Dawe also wrote many stories about the problems of colonial civil servants faced when pursuing interracial marriage, as these were issues he witnessed first hand while traveling.
Towards the end of his life, Dawe also had two plays filmed, The Black Spider (US: Foolish Monte Carlo) in 1920 and The Shadow of Evil in 1921.