C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (1866–1944) was born in Bibury, Gloucestershire, and educated at Bradford Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge. He worked as a journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction, creating the red-haired Welsh sea captain Captain Kettle in 1897 for Pearson's Magazine, a serial hero commissioned to rival Sherlock Holmes and popular enough that Hyne wrote him across a dozen further volumes. The Lost Continent (1900), his best-remembered novel today, recasts Atlantis — inspired by Ignatius Donnelly's speculative Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1880) — as a functioning empire with its own court intrigue and factional politics, framed as a manuscript written by one of its own priests. He wrote roughly fifty novels in all, some under the pseudonym Weatherby Chesney, and died in Kettlewell, Yorkshire.