Obituary: Michael Sissons

Author Philip Norman remembers his agent, Michael Sissons:

Michael Sissons was a beyond-brilliant agent for my books for almost 50 years and a friend whose boundless joie-de-vivre never failed to top up my rather meagre supply to overflowing. Raised among alcoholics as I was, I normally have a deep antipathy to boozing, but Michael had only to say "Let’s get really drunk tonight" for it to seem a thoroughly sound plan.

Others may remember Sissons the killer deal-maker, the book trade visionary, the Groucho Club co-founder, the MCC stalwart, the countryside campaigner or the dogged equestrian. For me his finest hour will always be dressing up as Debbie Harry and singing The Tide Is High in the publishers’ pantomime.

In 1969, I started writing a novel, despite having not the first idea how it was done. A friend who knew Michael’s colleague Pat Kavanagh persuaded her to show him my first chapter. "He wants to take you on," Pat reported back. "He said you made him laugh even though he had a hangover."

A few weeks later a letter arrived from Michael, beginning: "I’m delighted to say we’ve hit the button first time…". He had sold my dreadful novel (whose title I’d rather not mention) to Heinemann for a £350 advance. So far as I was concerned, he went on regularly hitting the button for almost another half century.

When we first met, ‘beady-eyed Michael Sissons’, as I often heard him called, was the kingpin of A.D Peters Ltd. in Buckingham Street, just off the Strand. Then there was still an actual A.D. Peters, Michael’s surrogate father and one of the funniest men I’ve ever met, though I can’t recall a single word he said. The top floor was a private flat occupied by an elderly couple who could sometimes be glimpsed picking their way downstairs past the bookshelves, photocopiers and visiting literati.

Michael in those hippy late 60s seemed a thoroughly metropolitan figure, often seen at book-launches in a kaftan, billowy trousers and a necklace and giving the namaste peace-sign (which any publisher who has done battle with him over a contract may find hard to imagine.)

Outwardly we seemed to have little in common, my interest in such things as cricket or belonging to the Garrick Club being severely limited. Where we connected totally was in our passion for music. I seem to hear him now singing Joni Mitchell’s Carey and Cat Stevens’s Father and Son and mournful country and western standards like I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry with his own one-finger guitar accompaniment.

In the early 80s, I went to live in New York, grandly inviting Michael to come and stay anytime in my spacious TriBeCa loft. Unfortunately, after a few months I moved to an apartment on the Upper East Side so small, as Ken Dodd would have said, that it had hunchbacked mice.

It was then that Michael announced he’d be paying me a visit and ‘Serena’ would be arriving a day after him. He didn’t tell me who this Serena was and I didn’t like to ask. This put me in a terrible quandary, for the apartment had only one proper bed. Supposing she should be one of his daughters I didn’t know about?

From his New York opposite number, Peter Matson, I learned that Serena was the grand passion of his life and they were running away together, not to the Plaza or the Carlyle but to my pathetic little matchbox. It was a tight squeeze, with Michael’s enormous sponge-bag alone filling the minuscule bathroom like a white whale. But Serena proved wonderfully sweet and tolerant and it seemed as sound a plan as ever to get ‘really drunk’ that night on Amaretto liqueurs at Elaine’s.

After he met Serena, Michael’s main interest outside work became horses, which she managed expertly and he sometimes found hard to stay on top of. On the very morning of their wedding, he took a tumble while out hunting, and went through the nuptials looking like he’d gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson.

As chairman of what had become Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (and of God knows else besides) his life did not always maintain its seemingly effortless balance of professional and social success. The mass defection from PFD to form United Agents wounded him deeply, for the defectors included long-time close friends. But for most of his clients, this one included, there was no question of going anywhere else.

Some of his many enthusiasms I could never share, such as foxhunting, the Liberal Democrat party, the novels of Patrick O’Brian and Elizabethan plainsong. We still had plenty to talk – and, always, laugh – about in our lunches at his beloved Groucho where, rather like Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, he was regarded as president for life.

In common with most of his clients, I had no idea how ill he was this past summer. Serena had also had health problems and looking after her had left him suffering, so it was said, from ‘complete exhaustion'. Or, as he downplayed it in an e-mail: "I’ve been under the weather". The horrible malady that had been diagnosed, and the horribly swift decline that followed, didn’t stop him from doing a deal for my new book on Jimi Hendrix from his hospital bed.

I did finally discover how things stood and was able to send him an e-mail saying how I felt about him, which arrived just in time. Doubtless like every other writer on his list, I find the prospect of a world without Michael simply indescribable.