Also, click for Down with Royalties, Giles' final contribution to the publishing world, published posthumously in The Author of Winter 2003/4 - acute, imaginative and straight to the last.
Although his reputation as a literary agent was made by a string of spectacular publishing deals, won for his writers through hard-nosed negotiations, Giles Gordon will be remembered for entirely different qualities. Affable, gregarious, witty, acerbic, an insatiable gossip and a veteran luncher - as the trade demands - he commanded affection and loyalty from his authors, to whom he stuck through thick and thin. He once wrote of Fay Weldon, whom he represented for 30 years: "I would follow her to the promised land. I would die for her." Of Peter Ackroyd, for whom, in 1994, he won a deal unheard of at the time - £5 million for his next four books - he said that what he liked most about working with him was that Ackroyd made him laugh so much. Ackroyd dedicated to Gordon his most powerful novel, Hawksmoor.
Vikram Seth, who picked Gordon as his agent after interviewing rival candidates, said that he had fallen for him, despite his "exceptionally stupid white suit", because Gordon had waxed lyrical about the fig tree in the office garden. "Giles said it was a useless thing, but he wouldn't let anyone cut a branch of it," said Seth. "I had a sense that he would negotiate well for me." And so he did, winning the Indian writer a £250,000 advance for his first novel - a record at the time - to be followed by £1.3 million for his Two Lives, a memoir of his great uncle and aunt.
Gordon discovered previously unknown talents, such as Sue Townsend, author of the immensely successful Adrian Mole books, which he described as "the best critique of Thatcher's Britain I have read." He was responsible for encouraging such seminal Scottish works as Iain Crichton Smith's Consider the Lilies, George Mackay Brown's An Orkney Tapestry and Archie Hind's Dear Green Place. He pioneered the work of Barry Unsworth, and he represented the novelist Allan Massie for all his professional life.
At the same time he was entrusted by members of the Royal Family, including the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, with handling their publications. His most notable achievement on their behalf was the Prince's book for children, The Old Man of Lochnagar.
His success rested, in large part, on his palpable love of books, and his understanding of the writer's trade. Because he had himself been a novelist - though not a notably successful one - as well as a publisher, his judgment was trusted. He was able to point out with authority the imperfections in a manuscript and help to ensure that they were ironed out before it was offered for sale. He demanded the highest of literary standards, and reckoned he turned down 98 per cent of the books offered to him, not always concealing his baleful opinions of mediocre writing.
He readily confessed that he had made some errors along the way - as a publisher he had rejected Joseph Heller's Catch 22, and he was unimpressed by the science-fiction offering of an unknown young writer called Salman Rushdie. But those were heavily outweighed by his success in spotting the potential of work that others had overlooked.
Giles Alexander Esme Gordon was the son of a distinguished Edinburgh architect, Alexander Gordon, and his wife Betsy, a Belfast pianist. Educated, unhappily, at the Edinburgh Academy, he wrote later that he had been regularly beaten by a series of sadistic teachers, and left determined never to put his own children through anything similar.
He studied design at the Edinburgh Art College, despite the fact that he was unable to draw, and then went on to become a trainee publisher with the Edinburgh firm Oliver and Boyd. He went south to join the London publishers Secker and Warburg as advertising manager, then moved on to become an editor at Hutchinson.
At Hutchinson he was once severely ticked off for sending a manuscript by their most successful writer, Dennis Wheatley, to be assessed by a reader. "Mr Wheatley's books are not to be read," he was told, "they are to be sent straight to the printer." He became plays editor at Penguin, before being appointed editorial director at Victor Gollancz in 1967.
It was there that he first formed the view that authors were poorly treated by their publishers. He noted that John le Carré had been paid a derisory sum for the runaway bestseller, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and both of them moved on in 1973, Gordon to become a literary agent with Anthony Shiel, later Shiel Land Associates, with whom he was to work for more than 20 years.
He also branched out as a writer. Three novels, Pictures from an Exhibition, The Umbrella Man and Girl with Red Hair, were published in the early 1970s. They were coolly received, their modernistic style failing to strike a significant chord with the critics. He went on to write and edit more than 20 other books, including several collections of short stories, and an irreverent autobiography, suitably titled Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement? which contained some sharp comments on London's literary, journalistic and theatrical world. By this time he was also contributing the "Bookworm" column to Private Eye.
He was, at various times, C. Day Lewis Fellow in Creative Writing at King's College London; lecturer at Tufts University and Hollins College, both American institutions with branches in London; he served on the Literature Panel of the Arts Council, and the management committee of the Society of Authors. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1990 and campaigned vigorously for the introduction of Public Lending Right. He was drama critic for the Spectator and the short-lived London Daily News.
He had married Margaret Eastoe in 1964, and they had two sons and a daughter. One son later committed suicide. His growing workload meant that he saw too little of them and less and less of his wife. They were in the process of being divorced, when she died of an incurable illness in 1989. In the following year he married Margaret McKernan, a Scot who was also in the publishing business and went on to be director of fiction at Orion Books. They had a son and two daughters.
At this point, to the surprise of the London literary world, he decided that the family should move back to Scotland. Both he and Maggie were determined that the children should be educated at local Scottish schools. They commuted to London from Edinburgh and shared responsibilities for the children, with Gordon walking them to school most days. He decided to split with Shiel Land, and, after a bitter and protracted legal battle, took many of his writers with him.
He joined the literary agency Curtis Brown, acquired an office in Edinburgh, and moved into a house in one of the most select streets in the New Town, where he was able to install his impressive collection of antiquarian books. The return of this fully-fledged London agent was not immediately welcomed in Scotland. He was viewed with some suspicion as an interloper, and when, in addition, he began, in columns for The Times and the Edinburgh Evening News to criticise the standard of Scottish writers and publishers in typically outspoken tones, he seemed to be heading for out-and-out confrontation.
Since, in addition, he was prone to intermittent episodes of insobriety which landed him in some famous scrapes, he was rarely less than controversial. But his charm, his patent devotion to his native country, and his enthusiasm for good writing won him more friends than enemies. Assessing his capacity for good living, his bons mots, his gadfly tendencies and his fondness for good gossip, one admirer concluded that he had "a touch of the Boswell about him". He was, as Johnson remarked of his biographer, "a very clubbable man".
Gordon died after a fall at his home. He leaves his wife and five children.
Giles Gordon, literary agent, was born on May 23, 1940. He died on November 14, 2003, aged 63.
I cannot now think of my friend Giles Gordon, who died nine days ago at age of 63, without recalling his almost incandescent loathing of a certain female Scottish novelist.
I have yet to meet anyone who nursed an animus so profound. He would react to the mention of her name as Superman does to Kryptonite, collapsing into a helpless puddle of fury while his eyes transmitted something close to superstitious dread. Giles was flamboyant in most things, particularly his grievances, but this was something else entirely. "I mean, what does she think she's playing at?" he'd plead, snapping his breadstick fiercely "Who'd listen to anyone so bloody . . . dreary?"
The strange thing was that this author wrote novels not dissimilar to the kind Giles preferred and, in fact, had himself written (to no great acclaim, as he was first to admit) in the 1970s: cerebral, high-prose novels concerning the difficulties of love, set in darkened rooms and plangent kitchens. If nothing else, there should have been some kind of literary kinship between them. And perhaps there could have been, had the writer not made the error which in Giles's book burned more shamefully than any other: the error of taking herself very seriously indeed.
Giles's public life was a one-man crusade against pomposity and cant, an elegantly crumpled war on self-regard. Having been touched several times by tragedy (the death of an infant child; the suicide of his son Gareth), he knew all too well the proper weight of seriousness. When he began to suspect that an author or politician was growing fond of the sound of their own voice, he would bristle eagerly and his sentences would explode into random fragments ("How can they . . . what is the point . . . I mean, honestly . . .").
Giles was a mocker, a contrarian, a conscientious objector to everything but good writing. This was why he aroused suspicion when he returned to Edinburgh in 1995, after many years in London. The cloistered world of Scottish letters resented his insistence that Scottish publishing could never be more than a misguided cottage industry that short-changed both readers and writers. His sensibility was essentially imperial: all roads led to Rome, he believed, or rather London.
The heavily subsidised publishers of unread Hebridean poetry and identikit dialect novels understandably hated this, but what they hated more was Giles's pedigree and erudition.
At this point it is worth explaining why Giles's death matters to anyone beyond his friends and family. Without his intervention, the literary world would have been far more sluggish in abandoning the dusty, elitist ways it followed in the 1950s, when the public's reading choices were essentially dictated by lending libraries and obscure periodicals.
By inventing the job of literary agent and insisting that writers be paid their due, Giles fired the starting pistol on a race which ended with literature being more popular and accessible than ever. When writers began earning big money they became celebrities and their celebrity drew many new kinds of readership. I doubt Giles anticipated this: he merely wanted what was fair for his clients. The effect, nonetheless, was seismic.
That aside, he was simply a charming, scandalously amusing man who always did you the favour of assuming you to be as aggrieved as he was. He was profoundly witty: witty in the sense of having his wits about him, with the ability to channel them into a coherent critique.
Scotland doesn't trust wit, it prefers the hard, uncomplicated jab of the joke, a fact about which Giles despaired every day. His love of the country was tempered by the knowledge that it harbours all too many like that female novelist he hated: the worthy, the self-important, the humourless. His untimely death tips the balance yet further in their favour, one reason, as if there weren't enough already, to feel bereft. An important critical and corrective voice has been stilled. One consolation is that Giles Gordon was always on the side of the angels, and may well be arguing with them as we speak.
"I had first contacted Giles Gordon in 1988... and I came to find him one of the nicest, straightest men in British publishing. When he learned of the 'no print-run' reasoning of Justice Lightman's judgment and OUP's defence, he was appalled and outraged at such nonsense, volunteering to act as my witness on it... I have always found it amazing that when this absurd lie, and potentially disastrous legal mistake about print-runs was publicly aired, not one single other person stepped forward willing, let alone anxious, to nail it. No-one else ever even wrote to me to confirm or correct my assumptions, and the only man of honour and action proved to be Gordon. If I, with Gordon's help, had not gone successfully to appeal, and Lightman's judgment had been allowed to stand as a precedent, hardly a single author's contract in the UK would now be enforceable."
Whether Giles Gordon, who has died aged 63 following a fall, was essentially an opponent or exponent of the accountant-driven, instant megabucks ethos of contemporary publishing is likely to be debated fervently in the clubs, pubs and restaurants of literary society. Less in dispute will be his status as a polymath: publisher, theatre-lover and critic (for the Spectator, 1983 to 1984, and the London Daily News during its brief life in 1987); restaurant critic (for Caledonia, 1999-2001); lecturer; newspaper columnist (the Times and the Edinburgh Evening News); short story writer and novelist (not a good one, as he said himself); and, above all, authors' agent who took a keen interest in his clients as people as well as profitable functionaries, providing literary criticism to survivors like Peter Ackroyd; Fay Weldon spoke of his ability to be quite sharp, though in the manner of a father who wanted the best for you. Gordon also provided a shoulder to cry on for the more vulnerable authors for whom he was alleged to have a soft spot.
With his cleft chin, big hair and voluble enthusiasms, he was an easily recognised figure in a publishing jungle into which he had helped promote the shift towards huge advances for profitable authors, to the disadvantage (which he recognised without paralysing sadness) of more modest writers who could scarcely get any advances at all. His move back to his native Edinburgh in the mid-1990s, when he became tired of London but not tired of life, proved to be not the more solid and less bitchy experience he had sought but the basis of other spats: he found the Scots ingrown and parochial; they thought he was patronising and debauching them with his London money and ways.
His beginnings hinted gently at the storms ahead. The son of an architect, Giles Gordon went to Edinburgh Academy, where he was scorer for the first XI at cricket and left with a record of failed exams. He then, briefly, attended the Edinburgh College of Art, where his father lectured on architecture, before joining Oliver and Boyd, the Edinburgh publishers, as a trainee in 1959. He stayed there for four years, even though finding making tea and licking stamps increasingly uncongenial, before coming to London as advertising manager of Secker and Warburg for a year. He then became an editor at Hutchinson until 1966, when he became editor of plays at Penguin, starting the Penguin Modern Playwrights volumes, at a time when another high-flying firework set on blasting the traditional publishing industry, Tony Godwin, was in charge. Gordon stayed for only a year.
It was his five-year period as editorial director of Victor Gollancz, starting in 1967, that established him as a publishing force. Gollancz himself had created the firm as a publisher of political and fictional books, all produced on a shoestring and appearing in uniform yellow covers. Gordon was determined to broaden out the brand, and was prepared to mine the resources of Scotland to that end. He persuaded Ian Crichton Smith to write a novel, published as Consider The Lilies in 1968, and published George Mackay Brown's An Orkney Tapestry in the following year. He also espoused Archie Hind's Dear Green Place.
Gordon was determined to make his own mark as a writer. In 1970 his first book, short stories under the title Pictures At An Exhibition appeared, published not by Gollancz, but by Allison and Busby. His defence against those who found the stories lacking in depth was revealing of his approach to life. "I don't really think of our lives as having narrative meaning," he said. "I think any person's life is a series of isolated events that one remembers, like snapshots, nothing before or after."
His own life tended to bear this out. He wrote six novels in the 1970s, some of them drawn from his own marital experiences, including the 1972 About A Marriage, which was credited with helping to end his first marriage, contracted in 1964, to Margaret Eastoe, by whom he had one daughter and three sons, one of whom died hours after he was born and another of whom, Gareth, committed suicide two years after the death of his mother in 1989.
None of the novels hit the jackpot, perhaps because they were regarded as too "experimental", and Ambrose's Vision: Sketches Towards The Creation Of A Cathedral (1980) was the last. He became reconciled - apart from publishing his own 1993 memoirs, Aren't We Due A Royalty Statement? (as Prince Charles once asked Gordon, as his own agent) - to handling in some way or other, be it agenting or editing, the literary work of others. This was to include representing Prince Charles in marketing his story for children, The Old Man Of Lochnagar, as well as the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duke of York.
A crucial year was 1972, because it was then that he left Gollancz, the stated reason being his clash with Gollancz directors who wanted to remove some of the sex from a Dennis Potter novel. He had become disenchanted with the way publishers treated writers, believing that they would offer authors as little as they could get away with unless the author was protected by an agent who was aware of market levels. John le Carré, he noted, had been paid peanuts for The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. He had come to believe that if publishers treated authors in a straightforward way, there would be no need for the "necessary evil" of agents; but that that was not likely to happen. Having made his decision, and joined the agents Sheil Land Associates, he went for publishers like a highwayman, levering the then remarkable sum of £650,000 for Peter Ackroyd's biographies of Dickens and Blake. His clients included Barry Unsworth and Sir Bernard Ingham.
As well as developing Ackroyd, he was credited with discovering Sue Townsend and getting a book out of her based on her radio sketch about Adrian Mole, and also championing Fay Weldon and helping her to make a large sum of money by mentioning Bulgari jewellery a dozen times in The Bulgari Collection (2001). He sold Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy for over £200,000 and inspired other agents to get even more for their best-selling clients as the unloved "middle list" authors all but disappeared.
His close involvement in the publishing scene at all sorts of levels - his list of the organisations he served added to the Who's Who entry he indelicately described as being as long as his male member - could have complications. As Seth's agent, Gordon dealt with the publishers Orion over A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music, though it also employed his second wife, Maggie McKernan, whom he married in 1990 and by whom he had two daughters and a son. However, Gordon's overriding pursuit of the author's interest led to Seth's next book, Two Lives, going to Little, Brown for £1.4m.
By 1995, the charms of metropolitan literary harlotry and back-biting had palled for him, and he headed back to Edinburgh to run the Scottish end of the mighty literary agency Curtis Brown, proclaiming that London was not the publishing centre it once was. Some publishers thought he had turned the Scottish Curtis Brown into a maverick boutique operation, and he was not averse to slagging off Scots publishers who suggested he represented few Scottish writers. He often gave the rough end of his flamboyant tongue to Jamie Byng of Canongate who, he asserted, published few Scottish books and yet was not criticised for it.
Giles Gordon's life was hectic to the last, even in Edinburgh, where he was brooding inconclusively about being a candidate for the Scottish parliament; and if he was often written down as a loose cannon whose tastes and behaviour were unpredictable, no one disputed that in an age of big money and small sensibilities, he was raw-nerved, more honest than most, an entertaining luncher and gossip, and always generously larger than life.
Fay Weldon writes: I always thought Giles a very good writer, but seeing what writers were up against, he chose to look after us instead. Though he really tried to drive, his instructor advised him to give up, since he had an overweening compulsion to drive into large objects. He was rather like that with publishers.
Amanda Craig writes: In the spring of 1992, my agent had retired, my publisher had been fired, and I was just pregnant with my first child. Within minutes of meeting Giles I had forgotten all this, and was filled with the intoxicating laughter that was to be characteristic of any conversation with him. The next day he asked if I would like him to represent me - adding that I should interview other agents before accepting. Much has been written about Giles's ego; little of his humility, generosity and courage. When, following a libel threat, Penguin cancelled my third novel, A Vicious Circle, his support for it never wavered. Even publishers who loathed him for being outspoken respected his judgment.
Utterly loyal, he could also be wicked about his clients - claiming that the novelist Joseph Connolly stuck his flowing beard on strand by strand every morning - and his bark of laughter always preceded the bite of outrageous anecdote. Yet he championed us all, irrespective of fashion, and to be on his list was an honour. Equally happy at the Garrick Club or the pub (depending on who was paying), he had a Puckish loathing of pretension that overlaid the highest literary standards. He wasn't only an agent, or a friend. He was family.
Michael Billington writes : I knew Giles as both literary agent and drama critic; only two weeks ago I bumped into him at the Garrick and asked if he had ever had difficulties reconciling his critical integrity with the club's fraternalism. He told me that he had once written a damning review of a Kingsley Amis novel for the Evening Standard, and gone to lunch at the Garrick the next day. Over the soup, his companion nudged him to point out Amis at an adjoining table. Giles turned round only to see the furious Amis repeatedly and unequivocally raising two fingers in his direction.
Giles's work as Spectator drama critic was, however, more remarkable for its perceptiveness than its hostility. He saw, long before I did, the significance of Pinter's One For The Road, calling it "as necessary and inevitable a work of art as Koestler's Darkness At Noon". He also wrote with great wit. I still recall his review of Michael Hastings' Tom And Viv, in which he invoked the extra-terrestrial hero of ET, whose first words to the boy were a long drawn-out "Ell-i-ot": as Giles pointed out, he had the same drily sepulchral tone of the poet himself reading Four Quartets. Giles was an urbane critic and a lovely man who had the literary agent's one indispensable quality: a passion for good writing.
Giles Alexander Esme Gordon, publisher, writer and literary agent, born May 23 1940; died November 14 2003
Clients and friends of Giles Gordon, Scotland's esteemed literary agent, are considering holding a memorial service to commemorate the colourful life and career of their "friend as well as agent".
Gordon, 63, died on Friday, two weeks after a fall at his Edinburgh home. The list of authors who had trusted him to place their works with publishers included Fay Weldon, Vikram Seth, Sue Townsend and the Prince of Wales. A palace spokeswoman said the prince was "deeply saddened" by his death.
Yesterday poet and novelist Alan Spence, who had worked with Gordon for over 15 years, said it would be appropriate for a memorial service to take place after the funeral, details of which are yet to be announced.
He said: "I imagine that there will be so many people unable to attend the funeral because of the suddenness of Giles's death that it would be lovely to have a memorial service for him at a later date. I certainly know that a lot of people will want to pay their respects and give thanks."
Spence described Gordon as "irreplaceable", and added: "His death is desperately sad. He was outrageously funny, and the last of a dying breed of what I would describe as gentleman publishers. He was once described as a Rottweiler, which was fantastic when he was on your side and because he was a writer himself he knew the business intuitively ."
Author Michael Shea also welcomed a memorial service. He said: "I'm sure we will all want to gather at some point in the future and remember him. He was hugely important to me at the start of my writing career because of his constructive criticism and he has acted with the same help and support for a lot of young authors over the years."
Gordon is survived by his wife, editor Maggie McKernan, with whom he had three children: Lucy, 12; Claire, nine; and Leo, three. He also leaves two children from his first marriage to Margaret Eastoe.
Gordon was born in Edinburgh in 1940 and moved to London aged 23, to work as an advertising manager and editor. In 1973 he joined Anthony Sheil Associates as a literary agent, quickly gaining a reputation for his enormous appetite for life. He also wrote six novels and acted as a columnist and theatre critic. He returned to Edinburgh seven years ago and opened a Scottish office of agents Curtis Brown, allegedly to "the sound of groans from London", but he was determined that his children should go to Scottish schools.
He brokered stunning deals for his clients, including a rumoured £1.3 million advance earlier this year for Vikram Seth, building on previous triumphs, such as Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole. One author whom he turned into a household name was Fay Weldon. She told the Sunday Herald yesterday that Giles's first love was his family, but that his clients thought of him as a father figure.
"Now he is gone, and so suddenly and unkindly, we seem to have lost a father, a perennially young, lively, funny, involved, father, who moved in high circles and sometimes could be quite sharp, quite prepared to say that's the worst thing you've ever written ... and you'd forgive him. Like the best of parents, he was always on your side. Now we are bereft."
Author and close friend Meg Henderson said that for all the authors he had worked with there was now a huge void. But she added: "I hope people remember the fun he gave as all. He was the most outrageous little bugger you have ever met."
As one famously concerned about the length of his Who's Who entry - too long according to his father but, at the same length as his member, about right according to its subject - Giles Gordon would surely be amused at the amount of coverage his untimely death has generated.
Charming, infuriating, indiscreet, amusing, thoughtful, mischievous, egocentric - the list of adjectives that describe him is endless. He was a study in paradox and his relentless conviviality masked a fierce intelligence and prodigious capacity for hard work.
For Gordon was never simply a publisher or an agent. He was, at various times, also a novelist and short story writer, a teacher and lecturer, a critic of books, theatre and restaurants. He campaigned vigorously for the introduction of PLR, sat on committees for the Arts Council and the Society of Authors and played a key role in setting up the NCR Award, which metamorphosed into the Samuel Johnson.
Above all, he was fiercely loyal to his authors and his roster included Vikram Seth, Peter Ackroyd, Fay Weldon, Sue Townsend and Geraldine McCaughrean. For a time, he also represented Princes Philip, Charles and Andrew - at the same time as he was helping Peter Wright battle the Thatcher government over Spycatcher. Another paradox, for as much as he loved letting slip that he'd just come from the Palace, there was a large part of Gordon that was a natural subversive.
Though one could be forgiven for thinking it the other way round, Giles Gordon was named after Edinburgh's High Kirk. His father, Esme, was an architect and, at the time of his son's birth, in charge of the fabric of the Cathedral. Gordon was born and brought up in the city, where he attended Edinburgh Academy and then the Edinburgh College of Art. Having studied design and typography, he began his publishing career at Oliver & Boyd, "a proper Scottish publishing house". He came to London in the early Sixties to work for Secker & Warburg. There were tours of duty at Hutchinson, Penguin and Gollancz before he finally became a literary agent at Anthony Sheil Associates in 1972, moving to Curtis Brown in 1995 and returning to Edinburgh to open the agency's Scottish office.
Finally, of course, there was Private Eye, which he adored. PN once asked if he were Bookworm. "Certainly not!" He studied the floor before looking up with a wry grin. "Paul Bailey said to me the gossip's so boring when I'm on holiday."
Giles Gordon's funeral was due to take place at St Giles' Cathedral today (21 November) - a memorial service will be held in London in the New Year. Anyone wishing to make a donation in his memory should contact Joanna Caldwell at Curtis Brown on 0131 225 1286. A full appreciation will appear in next week's PN.
Giles Gordon was a loveable and complex man who almost single-handed revolutionised the rather stuffy world of UK publishing. He was a born negotiator who always came well prepared to meetings and knew exactly what his author was worth. He was passionately loyal to his clients and fought tooth and nail on their behalf. He had a well-deserved reputation for discovering and encouraging new talent and knew exactly which author would suit which publishing house. He represented about 80 authors, including most of the leading contemporary writers and some Royal princes. He was an affable and gregarious man who greatly enjoyed his home life in one of Edinburgh's most enchanting streets.
Giles Alexander Esme Gordon was the son of Alexander Gordon, a well-known Edinburgh architect. He attended the Edinburgh Academy where his principal claim to fame was that he was an assiduous scorer for the first XI for three years. He was to write later in life that he had the unhappy experience of being beaten by the school's traditional weapon, the clachan, on more than one occasion
Gordon studied design at Edinburgh College of Art (where his father also taught architecture) but left after a few years to join the firm of Oliver and Boyd. He left Edinburgh in 1962 to work with several London houses before he was appointed editorial director of Victor Gollancz.
One of his first major successes while at Gollancz was to publish George Mackay Brown's elegiac An Orkney Tapestry (1969) and Iain Crichton Smith's first novel, Consider the Lilies.
Gordon had an astute and sharp mind and gradually formed the view in the Seventies that authors were being poorly treated by publishers. John Le Carre had written a best-seller in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and received major benefits only when a film was made. This Gordon determined to correct, and he joined the literary agents Shield Land in 1972. He rapidly attracted a group of writers to his agency to whom he remained unquestionably loyal (at least in public) for the rest of his life.
One of his first authors was Fay Weldon, of whom Gordon, with typical bravado, once said "I would follow her to the promised land." He soon signed up Peter Ackroyd whose pithy prose he adored.
In 1994 Gordon negotiated a record deal of £5 million for Ackroyd's next four books and was rewarded by the author dedicating his magnificent tome on Hawksmoor and his churches to Gordon.
But there are two writers who, more than any others, underline Gordon's worth as an agent. Vikram Seth went to him as a virtually unknown writer and Gordon immediately recognised a very real and exciting talent. He won an advance of more than £250,000 for his first novel and £1.3 million for his next.
But perhaps the quirky and esoteric nature of Gordon's own talent is best captured in the discovery of that Seventies icon of the Lower Fourth: Adrian Mole. Sue Townsend had sent a dog-eared script into the BBC who had broadcast it as a one-off afternoon play. Gordon thought "Mole had legs", as he cunningly put it. Hence, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole came out in 1982 and went into a second print immediately. There followed a television series and a sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, came out to equal success in 1984.
But it was Gordon's intuition that recognised their potential and, as he commented many years later: "They were the best critique of Thatcher's Britain I have read."
At the end of the Eighties, he moved to the well-known literary agents Curtis Brown and soon surprised his London colleagues by moving north and working from offices in Queensferry Street and living in Ann Street in the New Town. Gordon rightly maintained that, with modern technology, it was as easy to work from Edinburgh, and he and his second wife wanted to give their children the benefit of a Scottish education. This he did, and he enjoyed walking his children to school, collecting his miniature soldiers (which were proudly displayed for passers by on Ann Street to see) and reading countless scripts and proofs.
The move north also allowed him to further his connections with Scottish literary figures. He had long championed (and represented) Allan Massie but Gordon also encouraged the likes of Archie Hind and Barry Unsworth. Gordon also wrote some suitably poignant columns in the Edinburgh Evening News which provoked outrage and adulation in roughly equal amounts.
Gordon delighted in being a literary polymath. He had written three stimulating novels, taught writing at King's College, London, and in the United States, worked as a drama critic for The Spectator and edited a great many collective narratives. He carried out interviews with leading British playwrights for an American magazine - he was one of the last people to interview Joe Orton before his murder.
Three members of the Gordon List (which he liked to mention occasionally) were Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew. Indeed, it was while discussing Prince Charles's The Old Man of Lochnagar that the prince is supposed to have asked his agent: "Aren't we due a royalty payment?" It provided Gordon with the title of his autobiography, which was published in 1993.
Gordon's career was often embroiled in political controversy. He looked after Nikolai Tolstoy's The Minister and the Massacres which landed up in a lengthy legal battle and also represented Peter Wright in Spycatcher which ended up in a Sydney court with the British Cabinet Secretary famously commenting that Wright had been "economical with the truth".
Colleagues remember Gordon with much affection. "He was colourful, provocative and a one-off. But he was intensely shrewd and had a cunning and intuitive mind that made him exciting and vital company," said one.
Gordon married Margaret Eastoe in 1964. She died in 1989. They had two sons and a daughter. One son committed suicide in 1994. In 1990 Gordon married Maggie McKernan and she and their son and two daughters survive him.
The life of Giles Gordon, the celebrated Edinburgh literary agent who died after a tragic fall at his home, was remembered yesterday in the cathedral for which he was named.
In keeping with the legion of clients and friends who embraced him in life, the several hundred mourners drawn together by his death included some of the best known names of UK literary life and the arts in Edinburgh.
Mr Gordon's funeral service at St Giles' Cathedral included a reading from the Book of Revelations, by Vikram Seth, the writer for whom he once secured a £1.4 million advance.
But the service's most moving moments came when his daughter Lucy, 12, read the Robert Louis Stevenson poem The Lamplighter, from a Child's Garden of Verses, followed by a simple, short prayer by her sister Claire, nine: "Of faith, hope, love have I, these three, but the greatest of these is love."
Mr Seth arrived in the funeral cortege with Mr Gordon's widow, Maggie McKernan. Their third child Leo, three, walked with his two sisters.
The mourners filled pews to overflowing yesterday in an impressive tribute to a literary life lived large. They ranged from the authors Ian Rankin and Joseph Connolly to the broadcaster Magnus Magnusson, a former rector of the University of Edinburgh. They included the Scottish poet and short story writer Ron Butlin, the Scottish author Angus Calder, and the Irish poet Theo Dorgan.
Senior figures from Mr Gordon's literary agency, Curtis Brown, arrived with The Scotsman's editor, Iain Martin, and a former editor, Magnus Linklater.
Mourners heard from the Rev Dr Hilary Smith of a man who loved Edinburgh and "its history, its architecture, its beauty, its creativity".
"It was fitting to give thanks for Giles' life in the vibrant heart of this great city," she said. She described it as an "immensely spirited life" marked by its exuberance, creativity, and its contribution to British literature. His love for Maggie and his children, she said, was "the relationship he most cherished and where he received his inner strength".
Mr Gordon, educated at Edinburgh Academy and the Edinburgh College of Art, began life as a writer in his own right, but his career in publishing ended with him becoming one of the UK's best known literary agents.
He set out to help end an era where many felt writers underpaid and underrated by their publishers. He secured Vikram Seth £250,000 for his first novel, A Suitable Boy, and took particular pride in fostering the phenomenal success of Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. He represented the writers Peter Ackroyd and Fay Weldon, and sold Prince Charles's children's book The Old Man of Lochnagar.
Mr Gordon moved back from London to Edinburgh seven years ago to open a Scottish branch of the literary agents Curtis Brown, managing - over the scepticism of his critics - to hold on to his A-list of clients. He capped his career by winning a £1.4 million advance, a record, for Seth's memoirs.
The theme of the service - centred on a life of exuberance and spirit, which inspired and enriched those it touched - was set by a poem by the 20th century Scottish poet Norman MacCaig.
"He went through a company like a lamplighter," reads the opening verse of Praise of a Man, "see the dull minds scattering sparks of themselves, becoming razory, becoming useful."
The author Allan Massie, in a tribute, remembered him as intensely loyal to his clients, managing the rare achievement of mixing business and friendship. "He was a model agent, utterly dependable, always courageous and supportive," Mr Massie said.
"There was also a very rich, Scottish, and very Edinburgh stoicism at the heart of his nature," he added. Mr Massie offered sympathy to Ms McKernan and their young children, and also to the two surviving children of Mr Gordon's first marriage, Callum and Hattie.
He ended by recalling Sir Walter Scott's words as he stood by the Canongate grave of his oldest friend, Johnny Ballantyne: "I feel as if there will be less sunshine for me from this day forth."
Mr Massie said: "There will be less sunshine for all of us."
Giles Gordon, who has died aged 63 after a fall, was a man of letters, with wide-ranging gifts as a novelist, publisher, poet, teacher, critic and editor; but he was best known as one of the most astute and well-connected literary agents in the business.
Gordon took on the role in 1972 when agents, he later said, were becoming more and more essential. This was because publishers were increasingly less likely to control their own imprints, and therefore less able to treat authors as favoured citizens. Agents were necessary as buffers between the two parties in their mounting problems of communication, mainly over money, which the publisher tried his hardest to withhold while the docile author fumed.
Gordon proved an able translator and facilitator and before long built up a stable of 80 of the best known and most appealing writers in Britain. His colleague Janet Fillingham took on Sue Townsend, a promisingly quirky playwright from Leicester, and sent a few pages about a boy called Nigel Mole to John Tydeman, a producer of BBC radio drama. Tydeman, having persuaded Townsend to change the boy's name to Adrian, broadcast the sketch, which went down well.
Gordon then realised there might be a book in it. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 was published in 1982. Gradually a word-of-mouth campaign got going, and the book began to sell; by the end of the 1980s more copies of The Secret Diary and its sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984), had been sold during the decade than of any two books by anyone else.
The second-most famous book with which Gordon was involved was Spycatcher (1987) by Peter Wright, with Paul Greengrass. Gordon had suggested this book, which led to four years of controversy and court cases, be written. However, although he also handled as agent The Minister and the Massacres (1986) by Nikolai Tolstoy, which gave rise to a celebrated libel action, Gordon was most enlivened not by dispute but by adult fiction.
He was especially proud to represent Peter Ackroyd ("probably the most brilliant writer of his rather clever generation") but, if pressed, would concede his favourite author was Fay Weldon, whose energy, intellect, sharp and wide-ranging mind and compassion made him prepared, he said, to die for her.
Gordon also acted as literary agent for the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duke of York, which services he was not always reluctant to mention.
Giles Alexander Esme Gordon was born in Edinburgh. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, where his greatest achievement was for three years to be scorer for the first XI. He then spent a brief period at Edinburgh College of Art, but soon gave up higher education to join Oliver & Boyd as a trainee publisher.
He left Edinburgh for London in 1962 and worked for publishers through the 1960s, rising to become editorial director for Victor Gollancz from 1967-72. In this capacity he was most proud of getting George Mackay Brown to put together An Orkney Tapestry (1969), and of persuading Iain Crichton Smith to try a novel: the well-regarded Consider the Lilies (1968) was the result.
At this time, Gordon also found work interviewing playwrights for The Transatlantic Review, which he relished. His subjects included Tom Stoppard, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond - whom he found difficult - and Joe Orton, whose interview appeared in the magazine after Orton had been murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell.
Between 1971 and 1980 Gordon had six novels published, the most successful being About a Marriage (1972), which was credited with helping to end his first marriage, entered into in 1964, to Margaret Eastoe. They had one daughter and three sons, one of whom died hours after he was born and another of whom, Gareth, committed suicide at 24, two years after the death of his mother in 1989.
For a while Gordon was regarded as a promising "experimental" novelist, but all six books are long out of print.
He also edited several books - too many, he suspected - though he was particularly pleased with Shakespeare Stories (1982), for which he asked a number of writers to take any aspect of Shakespeare and see how the inspiration flowed. Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and Kingsley Amis were among those who contributed; nevertheless, it was swiftly remaindered.
Of his many jobs, the one Gordon most enjoyed was a stint as theatre critic for The Spectator in 1983-84 when a change of editor led to widespread changes at the magazine. He briefly reprised the role for the short-lived London Daily News, in 1987.
His jocular autobiography, Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement? , a question once asked of Gordon by the Prince of Wales, was published in 1993. In it was revealed a mild obsession with being accepted into the pages of Who's Who, a concern which had doubtless been provoked by his father asking him every year whether he had made it.
Gordon's father - who taught architecture at Edinburgh School of Art and was senior partner in a firm of Edinburgh architects - had entered the book in 1958. Giles Gordon was admitted in 1991.
Gordon returned to live in Edinburgh in 1998, a change of location which was taken to suggest something positive about late 20th-century Scotland. He, however, found himself often dismayed by the state of the land of his birth, and said so, with feeling, in his column in the Edinburgh Evening News.
Gordon is survived by his second wife, Maggie McKernan, their son and two daughters and a son and daughter from his first marriage. That daughter, Hattie, recently wrote a memoir of her brother Gareth of which her father, who considered most memoirs "drivel", somewhat disapproved.
Giles cordon, the writer and literary agent who contributed to the Eye's World of Books and Books and Bookmen features for many years, has died as a result of a fall at his Edinburgh home.
A man of immense charm, Giles combined a passion for books and good writing with a love of mischief and gossip.
As a journalist, he flourished at a time when the publishing world was still in the hands of all-powerful and often eccentric individuals - George "Popeye" Weidenfeld, Andre Deutsche, Tom Maschler, Sir "Sincere" Stevenson and others. This galère formed the cast of Giles' columns.
In the eighties, this cosy world began to change as the little firms were swallowed up by big conglomerates. Giles reported how when Reed took over Methuen, the new owners tried to discourage authors from coming into the building as they tended to make a mess with their untidy manuscripts. Collins was bought by Murdoch whose henchman Eddie "McBastard" Bell became a favourite target of Giles.
Giles had considerable powers of foresight and was invariably able to predict the Booker prize winner. His gossip, his warmth and his boyish enthusiasms will be much missed.
New Bookworm adds...
The untimely death of Giles Gordon leaves the book world a less amusing place. Agent, author, bon vivant and custodian of this column, Giles was fun.
However, he could also be deadly serious, particularly when it came to representing his authors. Some suggest that as an agent, he was at least partially responsible for pushing authors' advances into the stratosphere.
After all, was it not Giles who asked Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson for £1 million for Peter Ackroyd's biographies of Charles Dickens and William Blake (finally, they agreed on £650,000 - still an amazing sum for a publisher to pay back in 1989)? And what of the £1.3 million Giles got from Time Warner for Vikram Seth's forthcoming book Two lives?
All true enough; but Giles' main concern was representing real writers: Seth's advance is still only two-thirds what Penguin paid Paul Burrell.
Giles had been a writer himself, so he knew the financial imperatives. He had also been a publisher himself, for the likes of Hutchinson and Gollancz, so he'd seen the rough deals that authors then received and the joy with which his paymasters stuck to their stingy contracts. As an agent, he set about redressing the balance with some success. That things have now gone too far in the other direction is less a reflection on Giles' rapacity then on publishers' tendency to follow blindly whatever the opposition is doing, only at greater expense. RIP Giles Gordon.
Click for Down with Royalties, Giles' final contribution to the publishing world, published posthumously in The Author of Winter 2003/4 - acute, imaginative and straight to the last.