Arthur Frederick Hobart Mills (12 July 1887 – 18 February 1955) was a British writer and military Captain.
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Early life and education
Mills was born on 12 July 1887 in Bude, Cornwall to The Rev Barton Reginald Vaughan Mills and Lady Catherine Mary Hobart Hampden (died 1889). Mills' was the maternal nephew of the politician Sidney Hobart-Hampden-Mercer-Henderson, 7th Earl of Buckinghamshire and the paternal grandson of politician Arthur Mills. Mills' had three younger half-siblings from his father's second marriage to Elizabeth Edith Ramsay, including the schoolmaster and writer George Mills.
Mills was educated at Wellington College and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Career
Captain Mills was gazetted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry in 1908 and served in China, India and Palestine. He was wounded in World War I at La Bassée and wrote a pair of books, his first, about that experience: With My Regiment: From the Aisne to La Bassée (William Heinemann: London, 1915) and Hospital Days (T. Fisher Unwin: London, 1916) under the pseudonym "Platoon Commander". At his wedding to Lady Dorothy Walpole, daughter of the fifth Earl of Orford, in 1916, her wedding ring was made from a bullet that had been surgically removed from his ankle.
Despite favourable reviews, frequent impressions, and global translations of many of his earlier books (The Broadway Madonna, The Gold Cat), Mills eventually became known as a genre author of cheap crime and adventure novels. His work has been largely forgotten.
Personal life
In 1916, Mills married the explorer, travel writer and memoirist Lady Dorothy Mills. Lady Dorothy Mills filed a divorce decree in 1932, on the grounds of her husband's infidelity. The divorce was granted the following year, and Mills married Monica Cecil Grant Mills (née Wilks) in the October.
On 18 February 1955, Mills died in Milford on Sea, Hampshire aged 67.