Toby Eady
Literary agent with a love of adventure who made a star of the art historian Sister Wendy Beckett
TOBY EADY, who has died aged 76, was a fiercely independent literary agent whose authors included Bernard Cornwell, Jung Chang, Sister Wendy Beckett and Rachel Seiffert.
Eady’s success was built on a mixture of personal charm and public haughtiness. His brusque inquiry about the status of a book jacket could be interpreted as a demand for increased authorial control, and his celebrated telephone silences could make publishers nervous – and lead to improved offers. He preferred to keep his agency small so that he could give personal attention to each client. For much of his career he worked with only one or two assistants, because he found it difficult to delegate.
Eady had founded his agency in 1968. His first coup came when he sold the film rights to a crime novel by Ted Lewis, which was turned into Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine. In the 1970s he moved to New York. Telephone answering machines had just become available, but while American agents were recording long-winded instructions his clipped English tones announced simply: “This is Toby Eady. I’m out.”
Toby Eady was the second son of the novelist Mary Wesley and was born on February 28 1941 at Boskenna, the ancestral home of the Paynter family on the cliffs of west Cornwall, where he spent much of his childhood running wild with a gang of children who had been evacuated from the Blitz.
At the age of 12 Toby was sent to sit the Eton scholarship but refused to answer a single question. He went instead to Bryanston, where he developed a passion for books. His mother noted that at 16 he was reading Plato, Dostoevsky, the Bible, Cicero and Ilya Ehrenburg “all at once” and had become “hysterical with excitement” on hearing Beethoven’s Eroica symphony for the first time.
He was a teenager when his mother told him that his father was not the second Baron Swinfen, as he had thought, but Heinz Ziegler, an exiled Jewish academic from Prague. He warmly embraced this change.
As a young man Eady was adventurous, disappearing for months on African journeys. Fiametta Rocco, another of his authors, recalled him arriving at her family farm in Kenya, “a free spirit travelling with just a toothbrush tucked into a book”. His mother, who had worked for MI5, thought that her son must have joined the same outfit.
On returning to England after 10 years in New York, Eady indulged his love of country pursuits. As a child he had been taught how to tickle trout by his godfather, the MI5 officer Richmond Stopford. He became an expert fly fisherman and rented a cottage on the River Test.
In the 1990s Eady enjoyed travelling around Europe with Sister Wendy Beckett, the art historian whom he transformed into a television personality. Their shared enthusiasms included Ascot, Cheltenham and Chassagne Montrachet, a wine that Sister Wendy described as “a gift from God”.
After the murder in Moscow in 2006 of another client, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Eady led a candlelit vigil outside the Russian Embassy and oversaw the posthumous publication of her Russian Diary.
Eady was frequently described by new acquaintances as “the rudest person I’ve ever met” but Rachel Seiffert recalled his “warm spirit and rebellious heart”. For much of his life he was a lonely man but a very generous one, assisting friends who had been widowed, paying for young acquaintances to travel in China and Africa, and lending considerable sums to clients whose fortunes were on the wane.
His first marriage, to Isobel Macleod, was dissolved. In 2002 he married secondly, Xinran Xue, author of The Good Women of China, who survives him.
Toby Eady, born February 28 1941, died December 24 2017