The Rev Robin Denniston obituary

Publisher behind some of the most popular novels of the 20th century
Robin Denniston
Robin Denniston's shrewdest move was to stick with John le Carré through the storm of protest that greeted the author's foray beyond the spy genre

Robin Denniston, who has died aged 85, commissioned some of the most popular novels of the 20th century during a distinguished career with six major publishing houses. He demonstrated his flair when, at his first post with Collins, he immediately spotted the potential of Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings stories. In a letter to the Guardian in 2001, Robin recalled this early encounter with the schoolboy: "I was fortunate enough to be the first person at Collins to read the typescript of the first Jennings book ... In the sombre darkness of a Glasgow early evening in 1950, Jennings's first letter home from school made me laugh aloud for so long my fellow labourers thought I must have gone mad."

His shrewdest move was to woo John le Carré over to Hodder & Stoughton from Heinemann, stick with him through the storm of critical protest that greeted the author's one foray beyond the spy genre, The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971), and go on to bring the world the George Smiley novels, starting with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Le Carré rewarded Robin for his unstinting support by staying with Hodder through 25 years and 16 bestsellers.

Publishing spy novels was perhaps a natural progression for the boy whose father had been head of the legendary team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. The literary agent George Greenfield noted in his memoirs Robin's apparent affinity with the genre he did so much to boost: he "could almost have been a character out of a Graham Greene or John le Carré novel … he had that vague, slightly shambling air that concealed a sharp and incisive mind." Fiercely proud of his father, AG (Alastair) Denniston, Robin would go on to document his contribution to British intelligence in Thirty Secret Years (2007).

Born in London to Alastair and his wife Dorothy, Robin grew up in the capital, then Worcestershire and Bletchley. Following Westminster school, a classics degree at Oxford and national service in the Airborne Artillery, in 1950 Robin married Anne Evans and took up a trainee post at Collins in Glasgow. He swiftly became an editor there, leaving to become managing director of the religious publisher Faith Press (1959-60). However, despite his deep Christian faith, his professional heart lay in mainstream publishing, and he moved on to a string of increasingly stellar roles at, successively, Hodder, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Thomson Publications and Oxford University Press, where we worked together for 10 years.

Robin – and his harmonium, which we would hear wafting out of his office from time to time – joined Oxford as academic publisher in 1978 and, by the time of his retirement in 1988, rose to Oxford publisher, managing OUP's entire academic publishing programme and second in command to me, as chief executive. I knew virtually nothing about publishing, but gave Robin my support and received his steady loyalty in return. Robin had an instinctive flair for dealing with people as well as books. Rapidly expanding our books and journals publishing programmes, he did much to transform an ancient institution to meet the challenges of the modern industry.

Having been ordained as a priest in 1979, he became a non-stipendiary minister at Great Tew, near Oxford (1987-90), and then minister to a congregation in Fife, Scotland (1990-93) where he had followed his second wife, Rosa Beddington, as she pursued an illustrious scientific career.

Rosa and Robin had married in 1987, after she had read the moving letters he wrote to a friend on the death from cancer two years earlier of Anne, with whom he had had a son, Nicholas, and two daughters, Susanna and Candida. Although 30 years his junior, Rosa also died of cancer, in 2001 at the vicarage at Great Tew, where the couple had returned at the request of the parishioners, after five years in Edinburgh, with Robin now as priest-in-charge (1995-2002).

Robin's books also included Anatomy of Scotland (with Magnus Linklater, 1992); Churchill's Secret War (1997), based on previously unknown diplomatic intercepts that he had uncovered; and Trevor Huddleston: A Life (1999), on his great friend the anti-apartheid bishop.

He is survived by his children.

• Robin Alastair Denniston, publisher, clergyman and writer, born 25 December 1926; died 6 April 2012

On the Guardian today

Today's best video
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/08/the-rev-robin-denniston/print
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-07
96931
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6QDNLYSZO7CDWNV52KOGCNAIS4X6DJW4
<urn:uuid:234addc5-55bb-42cc-98be-6971b79f7200>
2016-02-10T19:02:56Z
199.27.76.67
sha1:SH57E5THEJI3N6EKC73XVD7WMC6WODTT
<urn:uuid:1a84662d-4318-424e-b5bb-caaad16d10ec>
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/08/the-rev-robin-denniston/print
response
<urn:uuid:3eddb55c-5405-48ce-902f-a5126fe9c95a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-07
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf