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Born in 1923 and brought up in the west of Scotland, Hugh McLeave studied history and modern languages at
Glasgow University, spent five war years as an artillery officer in the Far East, then went into London
journalism, working for twenty years in Fleet Street with two national newspapers.
He was first a crime correspondent at Scotland Yard, then he covered the great events in science and
medicine all over the world for the News Chronicle and Daily Mail.
Among them in 1957 was a much too close-up look at an H-bomb test near Christmas Island in the mid-Pacific.
He has done interviews with such disparate individuals as J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb,
Klaus Fuchs, the spy who revealed its secrets to the Russians,
and the first space pioneers like Yuri Gagarin and John Glen.
He knew Jonas Salk, who made the first polio vaccine and the men who trail-blazed modern heart surgery on
which he wrote the first popular book, The Risk Takers.
His forty four works, fiction and non-fiction, include five like
A Question of Negligence and No Face in the Mirror, written round his psychiatric sleuth, Gregor Maclean.
He wrote a quartet of novels around a reluctant spy who found love and "retired" to the Himalayas.
His nonfiction list comprises The Last Pharaoh, the life of King Farouk, now being filmed.
In The Bent Pyramid, he uses much of the knowledge and experience he garnered writing The Last Pharaoh.
Among his other nonfiction books are a biographical history of the Foreign Legion,
The Damned Die Hard, and A Man and His Mountain, the life of the painter, Paul Cézanne.
Researching this gave him enough material to write a life of Emile Zola, Cézanne's bosom friend.
He also wrote a history of the most spectacular art thefts, Rogues in the Gallery.
He had lived in France for the last thirty-one years, fifteen of them in Aix-en-Provence
where Zola and Cézanne grew up together.
McLeave spoke five languages.
Hugh McLeave died Thursday afternoon the 6th of March 2008 in Gorbio near Menton in the south of France
after suffering several months from cancer.
Go to the Unpublished Books page to find his latest title "Cat Out Of The Bag" written in 2005.
Translated into Twelve Languages.
(Hover over the line above to see the list.)
Site Updated
(4 April 2008)
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