Robert Smythe Hichens was a prolific British writer who issued more than seventy books during a career that extended for more than fifty years. He was also a music critic for London World in the late 1890s, as well as a journalist and music lyricist.
Background
Robert Smythe Hichens was born on November 14, 1864, in Speldhurst, Kent, United Kingdom. He passed a conventional childhood in a family that particularly prized music. He was the son of Frederick Harrison Hichens, a clergyman, and Abigail Elizabeth (Smythe) Hichens.
Education
As a teen Hichens showed prowess as a pianist, and after a short period at Clifton College, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. Hichens also attended London School of Journalism.
Career
Hichens's career lasted for 50 years, he issued more than seventy books during that time. By his mid-teens Hichens had already published his first novel, The Coastguard's Secret, which concerns murder, romance, and the supernatural.
When young Hichens consequently worked as a songwriter, he determined to pursue a career in journalism. So Hichens began contributing articles to various newspapers. In addition, he resumed writing fiction, and by the mid-1890s he had published several tales in Pall Mall.
In 1893, after suffering a nearly fatal bout of poisoning, Hichens decided to recuperate abroad. He traveled to Cairo, where he befriended various writers who ultimately introduced him, upon their respective returns to England, to flamboyant writer and aesthete Oscar Wilde. Inspired by Wilde and his circle of admirers, Hichens wrote The Green Carnation, a satire of London society. Hichens initially issued The Green Carnation anonymously, but after the tale realized substantial success in London, he was revealed as the author, and he became a prominent celebrity.
The success of The Green Carnation brought Hichens work as the music critic of the London World, where he replaced George Bernard Shaw. But he held that post for only three years before leaving to concentrate on writing fiction. For the next four decades Hichens devoted himself to literary work and proved himself a writer of energy and imagination, but rarely showed impressive talent or artistry. He followed The Green Carnation with An Imaginative Man.
Hichens continued to pursue the peculiar in Flames, wherein two socialites indulge in occult practices and eventually fall prey to an evil ghost. Hichens then returned to social comedy in 1898 with The Londoners: An Absurdity, in which a divorced woman poses as her ex-husband to maintain her ties to London society. In The Slave, another novel of this period, Hichens again explores problematic desires.
In 1900 Hichens published Tongues of Conscience, a short-story collection that includes “How Love Came to Professor Guildea,” one of few Hichens’s writings that has remained prominent.
Among Hichens’s other notable publications from this period are Felix.
The Garden of Allah proved particularly favorable with the English public, and it later succeeded as a stage production and, on three occasions, as a film. Indeed, it ranks with “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” among Hichens’ few truly noteworthy works.
Another intriguing tale, The Call of the Blood, concerns a Sicilian father who discovers his son-in-law’s infidelity and undertakes a blackmailing scheme. In A Spirit in Prison, a sequel to The Call of the Blood, the compromised wife finally learns of her husband’s marital transgression. After producing these volumes, Hichens returned to the Middle East as the setting for ensuing novels such as Barbary Sheep, in which an English woman is exploited by a loathsome Algerian, and Bella Donna, wherein an unfaithful bride attempts to murder her husband while they honeymoon in Egypt. But Hichens also cast novels in various European settings. In the Wilderness, for instance, begins and ends in Greece, where a disenchanted husband has entered into an affair with a married woman already notorious as an adulteress.
Some critics have noted that Hichens’s fiction declined in quality after the aforementioned A Spirit in Prison.
Throughout the remaining decades of his career, Hichens continued to publish a range of novels. Some of these tales are exotic in locale, while others are more straightforward melodramas set in England. Most of them depict the less satisfactory aspects of romance: infidelity, deceit, and even murder. Notable among these tales is The Paradine Case, a 1933 publication, in which an attorney falls in love with his client, who is accused of murder, and must try the case before an antagonistic judge.
The Paradine Case was succeeded by more suspense stories, including The Power to Kill and The Sixth of October. Other tales from this period, the 1930s, are Daniel Airlie and Secret Information.
In the 1940s, though his success had diminished, Hichens continued to produce at an impressive rate. He published novels in each of the decade’s first four years, allowed a year’s lapse before producing another volume in 1945, then he finished three more works, including an autobiography, in 1947. The autobiography, Yesterday, features many episodes previously represented in the novels, thus raising— but hardly settling—questions concerning the nature of much of Hichens’s fiction.
By the late 1940s Hichens got less popular as a writer. Then his production slowed and his health faltered. He eventually withdrew to Switzerland, but he could not revive sufficiently to resume his impressive output. Even after his death in 1950, however, new titles appeared, including The Mask and Nightbound. Like much of Hichens’s work, though, these titles have passed into obscurity.