They Don’t Make Them Like That Any More

Before we dive completely into this challenging new year, let’s spare a moment to look back at another author we lost in 2007--but about whom strangely little was said at the time. I’m referring to James Leasor, who passed away in mid-September at age 83. Sad it is that very few readers today remember this British thriller writer, the creator of Dr. Jason Love, who at one time was second only to Ian Fleming’s as a popular British espionage character. In fact, Leasor was linked to Fleming by some unusual coincidences.

Britain’s Independent newspaper wrote about Leasor’s life just recently:

James Leasor was a writer of boundless enthusiasm, who could turn his typewriter to most genres, and seemed equally happy producing entertaining non-fiction as the thrillers that were his trademark during the 1960s and 1970s. While Ian Fleming had Bond and John le Carré had George Smiley, Leasor had Dr. Jason Love, a country GP who has to keep taking time off from his practice to battle his country’s ruthless foes (usually in the Middle East), armed with an automatic pistol, a knowledge of unarmed combat and a very fast car.

Throughout his life, Leasor was a lover of very fast cars and, like Fleming before him, once admitted to a fondness for the thrillers of Dornford Yates, one of whose skills was regularly to transform a description of a simple car-chase into something approaching poetry. When in the money, Leasor bought himself a 1937 American Cord sports car--“one of the few open Cords in Britain”--which he lovingly maintained till the day he died.

It was thanks to the film adaptations of his work, The Independent reports, that Leasor had the financial independence to turn to full-time writing.

During the 1950s, he wrote a number of entertaining popular histories, including The Red Fort (1956), an account of the siege of Delhi during the 1857 Mutiny and, with the American journalist Kendal Burt, The One That Got Away (1956), the story of the only German POW to escape British captivity. Later the director Roy Ward Baker turned it into a hugely successful film, with the German actor Hardy Krüger in the lead role.

Leasor was lucky with his films. Passport to Oblivion was turned into Where the Spies Are (1965); David Niven played a somewhat over-urbane Dr. Love. An even better movie, which also starred Niven, was The Sea Wolves (1980), adapted from Leasor’s Boarding Party (1978), about a real-life British attack on a German spy vessel in the waters off Portuguese--and so neutral--Goa in 1943.

The Times of London, meanwhile, carried its own Leasor obituary somewhat earlier last year. This is where we get to those Fleming-Leasor coincidences. Not only did actor Roger Moore appear as Agent 007 in seven theatrical releases, but he was one of the three headliners in The Sea Wolves. And as I learned from The Times, Leasor had been considered as a successor to Fleming in penning the Bond novels.

Such was Love’s appeal that when Ian Fleming’s estate decided to commission a new Bond novel it was Leasor whom they first approached. When he turned it down, the job went to [Sir Kingsley] Amis. By the late 1970s, however, tastes were beginning to change, and publishers intimated to Leasor that he was too old to make a convincing writer of thrillers. To combat this, he began submitting a series of adventures under the pseudonym Andrew MacAllan. These sold well--until he revealed his true identity to his publisher. Latterly he had been working on an autobiography.

Adding to the surrealness of these literary connections, Amis, who penned the first post-Fleming Bond novel (Colonel Sun, 1968), under the pen name “Robert Markham,” was a schoolmate of Leasor’s at the City of London School.