Peter Janson-Smith

Peter Janson-Smith was a London based literary agent, with a client list that included Ian Fleming, Gavin Maxwell and Richard Holmes. After Fleming's death in 1964, Janson-Smith ran the James Bond literary franchise. This lasted until Janson-Smith retired in 2001, after 45 years of promoting the works of Ian Fleming. He was on the committee of the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) for 30 years and president from 2003 to 2005. He negotiated the complex sale of the A. A. Milne estate's rights for Winnie the Pooh to the Walt Disney Company for $350 million, to fund the RLF's Fellowship scheme.

Early years

Peter Janson-Smith was born on 5 September 1922 in Navestock, Essex, to Rev. Edgar Smith, a Church of England vicar and his wife Alice, née Whitney.

Career after World War II In 1946 Janson-Smith was demobilised from the Royal Artillery with the rank of captain, but stayed in the Territorial Army, where he was promoted to major in 1948. The army had an employment service to provide opportunities for those leaving service, and the literary agent A. D. Peters had contacted them asking for an assistant with an ex-Services background. After interview Janson-Smith was taken on, and worked with Peters for the next three years. This gave Janson-Smith exposure to a particularly well known slate of British authors, including Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and J. B. Priestley. In 1949 he moved to the larger Curtis Brown agency, to manage their Foreign Language division. He did not possess any linguistic talents, but he greatly enjoyed the role, and it introduced him to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which became for him (and later his son Patrick) an annual pilgrimage.

At Curtis Brown he handled the foreign language translations for Eric Ambler, who in 1956 suggested to Janson-Smith that he should set up his own agency. Janson-Smith replied that due to the cashflow processes with publishing, this could mean a three year gap without income, which he couldn't afford. Ambler agreed to lend him money, in order to go ahead with this venture.

Literary agent

Janson-Smith set up shop in August 1956, as Peter Janson-Smith Limited, in an upstairs office in Artillery Mansions, Westminster. Later the agency moved to Great Russell Street and then Newington Green, by the site of Mary Wollstonecraft's former school for girls. Janson-Smith sold the agency in 1967 to Campbell Thomson & MacLaughlin after his workload switched to the Fleming franchise. Both agencies were finally closed in 2012. In the late 1970s, Janson-Smith was briefly a commissioning editor for the Oxford University Press (OUP).

Ian Fleming Janson-Smith attracted visibility due to his role as Chairman of Ian Fleming Publications, previously Glidrose, from 1966 until retirement in 2001. This company holds the literary and some image rights to Ian Fleming's work, and operates the franchise for the James Bond books, after Fleming death in 1964, at the age of 56 years old. Fleming had assigned his literary and film rights to external companies, a well used mechanism to reduce personal tax liabilities. It had the impact of allowing and developing the James Bond franchise, and the film series, well past the author's untimely death. The film franchise rights, with the partial exception of Casino Royale, were held by a separate company, Danjaq. As chairman of Glidrose, Janson-Smith arranged posthumous publication of Fleming's three unpublished substantive Bond books, The Man with the Golden Gun, and the then joint title of Octopussy and The Living Daylights.

Janson-Smith went on to allow a number of authors to continue to bring out Bond books – sometimes under a nom de plume – in the style of Fleming's original books, in part to protect the franchise from other authors' independent attempts. The first example of this was when Janson-Smith approached Sir Kingsley Amis in 1967 and he agreed to write Colonel Sun under the name of Robert Markham. He also helped steward the Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang literary rights. Janson-Smith appeared in Everything or Nothing, Stevan Riley's 2012 documentary of the James Bond franchise.

Peter Janson-Smith first started work with Ian Fleming in September 1956. Ian Fleming was initially looking just for someone to handle foreign translation rights to his books, since he felt able to handle his own contracts in Britain, and had an agent for the US market. Eric Ambler, during a dinner pary, gave Fleming the telephone number of Janson-Smith, who had a background in translations from his previous role with Curtis Brown. Janson-Smith impressed Fleming when he quickly got a Dutch publisher, Bruna, lined up, and this soon developed into a close business friendship.

After the death of Janson-Smith, on 12 April 2016,

Maxwell was one of Janson-Smith's most demanding and difficult authors, prone to temper tantrums and dramatic financial demands. Janson-Smith's calm personality was quite the opposite, yet they were very fond of each other, and Maxwell came to rely on Janson-Smith for emotional support when a series of disasters crashed over the Scottish author. He was Maxwell's agent from 1957 until beyond Maxwell's death in 1969 - he was one of the two literary trustees to Maxwell's estate. Similar to Fleming, Maxwell was a heavy smoker, drank copiously, and died of lung cancer at 55 years old.

Other authors Janson-Smith also represented Anthony Burgess briefly, including the contract for A Clockwork Orange, C. Northcote Parkinson, Alan Williams, the biographers Alan Palmer and Richard Holmes. The RLF was the biggest beneficiary, receiving a capital injection to the RLF's Fellowship Fund of £80 million. This provides long term funding for writers to be paid a stipend to work at British universities, in return for some teaching work, thus allowing the academic development of both students and writers. Over 750 writers have been funded since 1999.

Personal life Janson-Smith married three times. His last companion, from 1985 until his death in 2013, was Holocaust survivor Lili Stern-Pohlmann. Though he was renowned for his sociable drinking with authors, he also held serious views about the lessons from World War II, and made a number of visits to the Judaica Foundation Cultural Centre in Kraków with Stern-Pohlmann, to promote greater understanding of the Holocaust. He celebrated his 90th birthday with a concert held in his honour at the Centre. He had three daughters, Alice, Diana and Deidre. His son from his second marriage, Patrick Janson-Smith, was the successful publisher behind the Black Swan imprint, becoming part of Transworld and then the Blue Door imprint, part of HarperCollins.