James Leasor

Sep 25 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

TO BE the ghost of King Zog of Albania was a strange role, but the writer, who had once sung the Lord is My Shepherd with Lord Beaverbrook, was not inclined to turn down challenging commissions.

And he also ghost-wrote the autobiographies of the actors Jack Hawkins and Kenneth More. But his great success came with Dr Jason Love, probably Britain’s most successful fictitious spy after James Bond.

James Leasor wrote nine Love novels, starting with Passport to Oblivion (1964), later made into the film, Where the Spies Are, starring David Niven.

After an education at the City of London School, where one of his fellow pupils was Kingsley Amis, Leasor was drawn into journalism, an occupation which taught him to view money with a certain cynicism.

From his £1-a-week post as a reporter on the Kentish Times, he joined the East Kent Regiment and was sent to India on a troopship which was torpedoed by the Japanese in the Bay of Bengal. He spent six hours in the water. This experience was fed into his novel, Boarding Party (1976), made into the film Sea Wolves, again starring Niven.

Leasor would later be wounded in Burma, after which he served as a war correspondent with the Forces’ paper.

A spell reading English at Oriel College, Oxford, led him to the William Hickey gossip column on the Daily Express.

During this time he raised the ire of Beaverbrook, who discovered that he had been paying a lavatory attendant at the Savoy hotel £5 a week in return for society titbits, regaining the fee from expenses.

The press baron forgave Leasor, taking him on as his secretary, also charged with rewriting his autobiography, Success, for the American market.

Leasor turned freelance, at one time writing an advice column for Women’s Own, under the name of Douglas Anderson.

King Zog, who fled Albania when it was seized by Italy before the war, was so pleased with Leasor’s book that he appointed him a Knight of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

Leasor co-wrote The One That Got Away, a book about a Luftwaffe pilot, who escaped from prison camps in this country and made his way across Canada and the USA.

Another history book from Leasor, married with three sons, was Singapore: The Battle That Changed the World.

James Leasor, writer; born December 20, 1923, died September 10, 2007.