Born 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. 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 a too close-up look in 1957 at
an H-bomb test in mid-Pacific and interviews with such
disparate individuals as J. Robert Oppenheimer, father
of the A-bomb, Klaus Fuchs, who revealed its secrets
to the Russians, and the first space-race pioneers,
Russian and American. He knew Jonas Salk, who made the
first polio vaccine and the men who trail-blazed modern
of heart surgery on which he wrote the first popular
book..
His twenty-three works, fiction and non-fiction, include
five novels like A Question of Negligence and
No Face in the Mirror, written round his psychiatric
sleuth, Gregor Maclean. His non-fiction 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 non-fiction 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 has also written a history of the most
spectacular art thefts, Rogues in the Gallery.
He has lived in France for the past thirty-one years,
fifteen of them in Aix-en-Provence where Zola and Cézanne
grew up together. McLeave speaks five languages.
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