George John Whyte-Melville (1821–1878) was a Scottish novelist of the sporting-field and a poet.
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Born at Mount Melville, near St. Andrews. He achieved immediate success as a writer of fox-hunting stories with his first novel Digby Grand in 1854. Having served as a captain in the Coldstream Guards between 1846 and 1849, he volunteered as a major of irregular Turkish cavalry when the Crimean War began.
Bones and I, or The Skeleton at Home is an anomaly to the corpus of his work, since it is far from the worlds of the hunting field or the historical romance. Instead Bones and I centres upon an urban recluse who lives in a small, modern villa situated in a London cul de sac looking out upon "the dead wall at the back of an hospital."
He met his death while hunting.
His Songs and Verses (first published by Chapman and Hall in 1869) went through several editions. His other works include:
Several of these novels are historical, The Gladiators being perhaps the most famous of them.