Born and brought up in the west of Scotland, Hugh McLeave studied history and modern languages at Glasgow University. He speaks five languages. He spent five war years as an artillery officer in the Far East. Afterwards, he went into London journalism, working for twenty years in Fleet Street. He was first a crime correspondent at Scotland Yard and later covered the great world events in science and medicine for the News Chronicle and the Daily Mail. Among those, he once covered a too close-up look at an H-bomb test and interviewed such disparate individuals as J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb; and Klaus Fuchs, who revealed its secrets to the Russians. He knew the men who trail-blazed modern heart surgery on which he wrote the first popular book, The Risk Takers.

Hugh McLeave's twenty-three books include the novels A Question of Negligence and No Face in the Mirror, written around his psychiatric sleuth Gregor Maclean. His nonfiction list comprises The Last Pharaoh, the life of King Farouk, also a film; a biographical history of the Foreign Legion, The Damned Die Hard; A Man and His Mountain, the life of the painter, Paul Cézanne; A Moment of Truth, a biographical novel on the life and times of Zola, and Rogues in the Gallery, a history of the most spectacular art thefts. A Moment of Truth and Rogues in the Gallery are published by BOSON BOOKS.