Robert Hichens (aka Robert Smythe Hichens) was born in 1864 in Speldhurst, Kent, England, the son of Canon F. H. Hichens of Canterbury. His father had hoped for him to study at Oxford, but the younger Hichens displayed an extraordinary interest in music and was allowed to attend the Royal College of Music in London. He also studied journalism and later moved to Bristol, where he pursued training under the cathedral organist. It was writing that gradually took over Hichens' life as he reached his mid-twenties; he started as a freelance reporter and then turned to authoring short stories, which were published in various magazines, including Pall Mall. Hichens wrote his first novel, The Coastguard's Secret, in 1885, at age 21, though he didn't regard that as the real start of his career in fiction. That would come after a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1893-1894, during which he met Lord Alfred Douglas and was introduced by him to Oscar Wilde, who was already the most renowned author of his age. In the wake of that meeting, Hichens returned to England and penned the short novel The Green Carnation (1894), which he wrote as a parody of Wilde's style, with Douglas burlesqued as Reggie Hastings and Wilde portrayed as Esme Amarinth. The book was a huge success, and it launched Hichens' fiction-writing career.
For the next few years Hichens juggled his fiction writing -- generating around one novel a year -- with his work for the London World, where he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as music critic. He was successful with his books An Imaginative Man (1895), The Folly of Eustace (1896), Flames, and Byeways (both 1897). Hichens resigned his newspaper post after those books were published and spent the next several years living abroad in North Africa, Italy, and Switzerland, returning to England only during the summers, and devoting himself exclusively to writing novels and short stories. Hichens wrote in many genres, though his most popular books had a strongly exotic component in their settings and plots. His biggest seller from this period, and perhaps of his whole career, was The Garden of Allah (1904), a story of love and faith in conflict on the desert (inspired by his extended stay in North Africa), which sold over 700,000 copies. His 1909 book Bella Donna, about the British wife of an Egyptologist who is driven to murder by her affair with an Egyptian man, was inspired by Hichens' later stay in Egypt.
In 1915, Bella Donna became the first of his books to be licensed for motion pictures, followed a year later by The Garden of Allah. Barbary Sheep, The Slave, and Call of the Blood were all filmed during the next three years, and The Woman With the Fan was made into a movie in 1921. The Fruitful Vine, The Voice From the Minaret, The Lady Who Lied, and After the Verdict became movies in the 1920s, but the most significant of the films associated with Hichens was director/producer Rex Ingram's 1927 remake of The Garden of Allah, which represented the peak (and perhaps a little bit past the peak) of the renowned silent era filmmaker's art. Hichens was considered a major author into the 1930s and early '40s, and was one of the most popular of late Victorian and Edwardian novelists. His account of the early days of Zeppelin warfare in the 1914-1918 war is considered one of the more accurate, gripping, and evocative of its era, and he still rated a reasonably large place in reference books into the mid-'40s. Bella Donna was remade in England in 1934, with Conrad Veidt and Cedric Hardwicke in the cast, and The Garden of Allah was licensed by David O. Selznick in the mid-'30s and turned into a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer, but was principally a showcase for the newest developments in Technicolor photography.
The onset of the Second World War in Europe left Hichens' work seeming dated and archaic. Universal producer Edward Small and director Irving Pichel remade Bella Donna under the title Temptation in 1946, with Merle Oberon, George Brent, and Charles Korvin, without much success. Around that same time, Selznick produced a version of Hichens' 1933 novel The Paradine Case in which Alfred Hitchcock was effectively trapped in the director's chair. He made more of the old-fashioned story of a wife accused of murder and the attorney corrupted by his contact with her, than anyone had a right to expect, though it was still one of the director's most unhappy productions. In 1948, an Italian adaptation of Hichens' 1906 book Call of the Blood marked the end of Hichens' influence on films. Hichens died in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1950, at the age of 85. Selznick's versions of The Garden of Allah and The Paradine Case are the only movies based on Hichens' work that have remained in print for modern viewers.