Scottish Authors, Then and Now

Vitrine 1

James Hale (1946-2003) was a publisher, agent and one of the last of London’s great hands-on literary editors.

He was Macmillan’s editorial director for fiction between 1982 and 1988, and it was at Macmillan that he rescued Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory from the ‘slush pile’ and launched the career of one of Scotland’s most successful contemporary writers.

Hale was my father’s editor at Hodder & Stoughton in the 1970s, and he kept in close contact when he moved to Macmillan. This letter conveys his excitement at introducing one Scottish writer to the work of another.

Liam McIlvanney
Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies
University of Otago

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory. London: Macmillan 1984.
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan. London: Puffin Books, 2008.
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps. London: Penguin 2004.
Robert Burns, The Complete Works of Robert Burns. Vol. I. Edinburgh: Thomas C. Jack [1835].
Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volumes I and II. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
John Galt, Annals of the Parish; The Ayrshire Legatees; The Provost. Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 2002.
John Galt, The Member and The Radical. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1996.
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
James Hogg, Contributions to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Vol. I, 1817-1828. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. London: Cresset Press, 1964.
James Hogg, Tales of the Wars of Montrose. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.
Val McDermid, The Torment of Others. London: Harper, 2010.
Hugh M‘Diarmid, To Circumjack Cencrastus or The Curly Snake. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1930.
Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. [Massachusetts]: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.
Liam McIlvanney, All the Colours of the Town. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
William McIlvanney, The Kiln. London: Sceptre, 1996.
Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Victoria (Aust.): Penguin 2010.
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae; and, Weir of Hermiston. London: Everyman Publishers, [2000].
Robert Louis Stevenson, New Arabian Nights. Vol. I. London: Chatto and Windus, 1882.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.