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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