Robert Hichens (Robert Smythe Hichens) Biography

British novelist, short-story writer, and music critic, born in Kent, educated at the Royal College of Music, London. He is best remembered for The Green Carnation (1894), a sub-Wildean novel of fashionable London society, and for the best-selling Garden of Allah (1904), a romance of the desert, set in North Africa and combining sex and religion in equal measure. It was followed by Call of the Blood (1906), a story of contemporary Edwardian life, set in Sicily and North Africa, and by another novel displaying a fascination with Arab life and with the mystery and romance of the desert, Bella Donna (1909), whose wicked heroine comes to a bad end in Egypt.