Christopher MacLehose: A life in publishing

'The success of Stieg Larsson gives every brave little publisher the tiny hope that Britain could wake up just this once more and take a writer to its heart'

One of the most striking publishing developments of 2012 was the success enjoyed by small houses in attracting the attention of prize juries. But for the MacLehose Press, about to celebrate only its fifth anniversary, having prizewinning authors on their list is nothing new. "We love prizes", a post on their website announced, before adding: "Not so much your common or garden prizes like the Booker or the Samuel Johnson. More your Premio Campiello or Golden Owls– the most prestigious literary prize in Flanders … as if you didn't know."

If you did know, as a British reader, about the Golden Owls – and the most recent winner, Cees Nooteboom– it is almost certainly because of the activities of Christopher MacLehose, British publisher of both Nooteboom and Michela Murgia, who won the Campiello in 2010. Other MacLehose Press prizewinners in the last few months alone include Jérôme Ferrari's Prix Goncourt in France, Anuradha Roy's Economist Crossword Prize in India and Peter Terrin, who picked up the Netherlands' AKO Literatuurprijs, usually referred to as "the Dutch Booker".

While the MacLehose Press is a relative newcomer to the scene, it is now over 45 years since MacLehose himself moved from Scottish literary journalism to London publishing. In the years since, he has introduced British readers to writers in translation including José Saramago, Haruki Murakami, WG Sebald, Claudio Magris and Javier Marías, American authors such as Raymond Carver, Peter Matthiessen and Richard Ford and fiction from Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and, perhaps most remarkable of all, Stieg Larsson.

"Ah yes, Stieg Larsson," he smiles. "It is a shaming and shocking story." Around the time MacLehose was setting up his eponymously named press, after extricating himself from an unhappy period working within the corporate behemoth Random House, a Stockholm publisher brought to his home "two very large, and very battered typescripts and told me another was on its way soon. They then asked if I would be really, really kind and read this thing that they thought was very good, but absolutely nobody else in the English-speaking world agreed. It was by Stieg Larsson."

The omens were not good. MacLehose says a distinguished US publisher of crime fiction told him the book was such a mess it could not be fixed. "It appeared to be just another Scandinavian crime story, and worse, the author was dead and so couldn't write the fourth, fifth and sixth books needed for a successful crime series. The orthodoxy was that it therefore couldn't work in the market. I wasn't quite so harsh on the structure, although you could take the view that the first 50 pages were leisurely and rather familiar. It was encouraging that it had done well in Sweden and was beginning to do well in France. And the American-English translation was clearly quite hurried."

So MacLehose accepted the book on the condition that he could re-edit the translation. "I do think that almost every translation of a certain literary density has to be treated like an original text. If you had the author, you would make suggestions. We didn't have the author but that shouldn't stop you making the sentences more interesting for the reader." The first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo– the title changed from the Swedish Men Who Hate Women – sold 12,000 copies in hardback in the UK. "The most extraordinary thing is the pace at which it happened – 12,000 just doesn't happen to unknown writers from Sweden. It didn't happen to Henning." In 2010 the third and final volume of the Millennium series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, sold 400,000 hardbacks in the UK and was the biggest selling book in America.

The scale of success has brought some problems – for MacLehose in terms of wrangling with translators, and for the Larsson family in terms of inheritance litigation – but it has triumphantly vindicated his lifelong publishing philosophy. "A publisher should go where the books are, wherever that may be. The fact that Larsson is in translation has been completely overshadowed in readers' minds by the fact that it is something they want to read. Surely that's as it should be."

It certainly has been for MacLehose, who throughout his life has been surrounded by languages. At the family printing and publishing business in Scotland he remembers "people in the editorial department who could speak and proofread many languages". As a young publisher in London he entered an indiustry peopled by émigrés from all over the world. "Everybody read books in whatever languages they could and thought it normal to take books from other languages, translate them and publish them simply because they were the best books." He now lives in a home full of languages, not least because of his wife Koukla, a key part of MacLehose Press operations, who he has described as "French, with Greek as her first language, bilingual Italian, passable Spanish and rather good English". In such an atmosphere, he says, "authors who visit can feel that little bit more at home. That's how we like it. Even the dog is Hungarian."

MacLehose was born in 1940 into a family of Glasgow printers, publishers and booksellers: "seven generations, all of them second sons". He speaks particularly admiringly of one of his line who positioned his desk at the front of the shop so he could ask people as they came in "whether the new Swinburne, or whatever it might be, was of interest to them. That was how he worked out whether to reprint something. These days such decisions are made a little differently."

School was boarding at Shrewsbury, where John Peel (Ravenscroft as he was then) was a fellow pupil, as were the group that would go on to create Private Eye. Paul Foot was head of his house. "Richard Ingrams and his brothers were there, and Christopher Booker. I sat by Willie Rushton in history watching him do drawing after drawing. I wish I'd picked some of them up. They could have been my pension."

MacLehose read history at Oxford and then went to work on the Glasgow Herald with the specific intention of gaining six months' experience to enable him to move to London and work for the recently founded Independent Television News. But after a few weeks of working with features editor George MacDonald Fraser, later of Flashman fame, "I realised I didn't want to work in television, I wanted to work with language and words." So instead of heading back to London he worked in the editorial office of the MacLehose printing factory by day and would freelance for the Herald writing reviews and obituaries by night. "Eventually I was asked if I'd like to do the books on the Scotsman. Of course I said yes, even though I was very young."

He says it was a remarkably engaged literary environment. Once he went with a colleague to watch Hibs, the traditional team of Edinburgh Catholics, on the same day he had run a negative review of Iris Murdoch's novel about the Irish Easter Rebellion, The Red and the Green. "My colleague was recognised by a drunk in a pub as someone who worked at The Scotsman and we were both accosted with the words 'if I ever find the cunt who insulted The Red and the Green I will kill them'. That was Edinburgh. Even drunken football fans read the books pages."

Although he enjoyed great freedom to publish what he wanted, he reached the limits of his editor's patience with a series about postwar novels from around the world. "I was told if I gave the North Vietnamese novel more than half a page I'd be sacked." He wasn't sacked, but by this time had made many contacts in the publishing world. In 1967 he moved to London and into publishing and soon found himself PG Wodehouse's last editor, "which was a happy state of life, as you can imagine".

MacLehose visited Wodehouse several times at his Long Island home, "where he would amaze me by revealing the enormous sums it cost to mow and keep his vast lawn clear of leaves. He was adorable and loved to talk about cricket, although he did think it should adopt the baseball approach of three batsmen in turn from each side. After lunch we would watch soap operas on television and he would dissect how the plots worked with amazingly eloquent cogency." MacLehose's most memorable Wodehousian editorial query was when he phoned to ask "what would be the position if one wanted to slosh Jones – by which he meant being somehow rude about Antony Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret's husband, who had done something disreputable to do with the royal family."

In 1973 MacLehose took over Chatto & Windus, where he introduced to their mainstream list Toni Morrison and Bernard Malamud. "We didn't publish much in translation and I always wondered how Proust ended up on such a quintessentially English list." Next came Collins, where he oversaw the last books of Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Hammond Innes. When he moved to Harvill in 1979, the house that would become his spiritual home, he brought his experience of global bestsellers to a list known for high-brow translations and that already boasted Dr Zhivago, The Leopard and The Master and Margarita.

"I said we will go on publishing all the Russians we can lay our hands on, but we also need an injection of some petrol." The "petrol" was supplied by crime writing. MacLehose claims Martin Cruz Smith's 1981 mega-selling Gorky Park was the first real crime book he had read and that was when he was buying it. But by the time of Peter Høeg's 1992 international hit Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, he had come to the conclusion that he should confine himself to translated works, preferably featuring a policeman with a forensic element – although he did make an exception for Godfather author Mario Puzo.

He says that when the émigré generation "lost control or retired" from their publishing houses there was a dramatic reduction in work in translation. "And I find it almost inexplicable that it is tiny houses with no money that are still doing most of the work. MacLehose has translated books from 19 languages in its first five years. "Harvill – in its free days – published books from 32 languages. It is a wonderful system for the English reader in that not only have those books already been filtered from the upside-down pyramid of thousands of books by the overseas editor, we then chose the best of their choices." His reference to a "free" Harvill is delivered with a certain edge.

After a period of success, and MacLehose leading a management buyout in 1995, by 2002 the company was in financial difficulty and was taken into the Random House empire. For MacLehose it was not a happy experience. "The promises of total editorial freedom – every one of them – were overlooked." He was moved out of the main offices in Pimlico to the former Craven A cigarette building in Camden. "But it was the best office I ever had: vast, with a lovely view, and I didn't have a single meeting to go to for two years. Eventually I was allowed out and began to pick up some of the traces and about the same time, almost with a pleading tone, these people arrived asking me to publish Stieg Larsson."

And so the MacLehose Press was set up in his Islington home – and established in a more congenial partnership with Quercus books, itself founded in 2004 – from where he pursues both Premio Campiellos and Golden Owls as well as bestseller lists. "Every now and again someone in a large publisher will say something like, 'why aren't we in the Márquez market?' The answer is that they haven't been reading all those other books that aren't Márquez for 35 years to the point where you can identify the one that stands out."

The reason those Stockholm publishers came to him with Larsson was because he had made a success of Mankell. "But even he took a little time to really break through. There are two types of bottom line. A short-term bottom line and a long-term bottom line. Things often take three or four books, maybe longer, to take off. You have no way of knowing but by trying."

And is it possible to catch lightning twice? "The thing with Larsson is that it is an 80% proof narrative. Strong stuff. A character such as Lisbeth Salander – like James Bond – comes along once in a generation. That's not to say there won't be cardboard copies. I like the idea that someone would read Henning Mankell and then say 'give me another Swede.' This bandwagon has now attracted so many people that the quality of writing has, dare I say it, maybe not gone up. But the success of Stieg Larsson gives every brave little publisher who goes out and publishes a book they believe in, the tiny hope that Britain could wake up just this once more and take a writer to its heart." Reported by guardian.co.uk 11 hours ago.