MITCHELL, J(ames) Leslie

(1901-1935)

   Scottish novelist, known mainly for regional novels written as by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and for Scottish Scene (1934) with Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978). Under his own name he wrote popular archaeologyand fiction, much of the latter coloured by fantasy and romantic chinoiserie after the fashion of James Elroy FLECKER. Typical of these are The Calends of Cairo (coll of linked stories 1931; vt Cairo Dawns 1931USA) with a letter in preface by H.G. WELLS, and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights (coll of 2 linked story sequences 1933) with a foreword by J.D. BERESFORD. Three Go Back (1932; bowdlerized 1953 USA) is sf, combining ANTHROPOLOGY, ATLANTIS and TIME TRAVEL themes in a well written though awkwardly plotted story of three 20th-century passengers on an airship cast back in time (by earthquakes!) to Atlantis, where they find unspoiled proto-Basques in an Eden doomed by the nearing Ice Age and by conflicts with savage Neanderthalers, which decimate the tribe; the two surviving castaways then snap back to the present. The book is notable for its realistic and ebullient female protagonist, who adapts far more readily to her strange surroundings than either of the men. Very similarly, the eponymous female protagonist of Gay Hunter (1934), on being cast into a far-future Britain, adapts with commendable swiftness, stripping naked just as quickly as the heroine of the previous book, but remaining decorously virgin; eventually, espousing healthy athleticism, she helps defeat a fascist attempt to reindustrialize the country. "Kametis and Evelpis", a third tale linked to the previous two by similarities of plot,was left incomplete at JLM's death; John GAWSWORTH revised the manuscript and published the resulting novelette in his Masterpiece of Thrills (anth 1936), along with other posthumous sf and fantasy, as by Lewis GrassicGibbon. In the nonfiction Hanno, or The Future of Exploration (1928), JLM committed himself to some humorous thoughts about exploring both space and the centre of the Earth.

   JC

   Other work: The Lost Trumpet (1932).

   About the author: "The Science Fiction of John Leslie Mitchell" by Ian Campbell in EXTRAPOLATION, Dec 1974.

   See also: ORIGIN OF MAN.