For Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, it is the scoop of a lifetime and he never even had to bare his fangs. The predatory literary agent who aggressively bagged major English writers from Martin Amis to Salman Rushdie has snatched Evelyn Waugh’s literary estate from the agency that has handled it for the past 80 years.

The disappearance of Waugh from its stable is a huge blow to Britain’s oldest and most august literary agency, Peters Fraser & Dunlop (PFD), which has already lost the cream of its agents and authors in an internal feud that has riveted the publishing world. But it is the ease with which Mr Wylie nabbed the Waugh estate that will really set tongues wagging in the build-up to the annual gossip-fest that is next month’s London Book Fair.

The American agent, who has offices in New York and London, made his move the moment he was informed by his receptionist that Evelyn Waugh’s grandson had called. The Waughs, fed up with turmoil at PFD, which had represented the author since he wrote Decline and Fall in the late 1920s, were seeking new representation.

“Andrew was just unbelievably quick,” Alexander Waugh said yesterday. “No sooner had I said who I was and what I wanted than the telephone rang back. Andrew was very, very keen to do something with the Waugh estate.”

The family had become alarmed by reports of problems at PFD and walk-outs by its agents. “PFD had lost a lot of living writers,” Mr Waugh said. “It seemed possible it might not succeed, so we shopped around.”

The Waughs called a family conference and Mr Wylie’s name emerged. He hails from New England gentility and earned his nickname after aggressively persuading Martin Amis to leave PFD by negotiating a more generous £500,000 advance for the writer’s 1995 novel The Information. The novelist Julian Barnes, whose wife Pat Kavanagh had served as agent to Amis, branded Mr Wylie a “card-carrying s**t”.

Mr Waugh said: “We all thought it might be quite nice to have a jackal baring his teeth and snarling ferociously.” Almost as soon as he got off the phone to the family, Mr Wylie was on a plane to woo Teresa D’Arms, Waugh’s oldest surviving child, who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“We always look up to her to make final decisions,” Mr Waugh said. “She is capo di tutti capi of the gang.”

The loss of Waugh from its stable is the cruellest of many recent blows inflicted on PFD. Although it had lost Ruth Rendell, the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and the children’s novelist Anthony Horowitz, the company had at least retained a sturdy backlist of departed writers, including the estates of authors such as V.S. Pritchett and Roy Jenkins. But Waugh was the jewel in their crown. The Waughs’ loss of faith in PDF is more devastating since the relationship dates back so far. Under a longstanding arrangement, PFD still owns 20 per cent of the estate. All the existing contracts it has negotiated will remain.

Mr Wylie has grand plans for reviving Waugh in the US. His client list boasts Elmore Leonard, Philip Roth and Al Gore. His philosophy is to pursue high-quality writers who will stand the test of time. Waugh has endured so robustly that Brideshead Revisited has just been filmed 63 years after its first publication, starring Ben Whishaw and Emma Thompson. (Waugh’s film rights, however, will remain with Anthony Jones, a PFD defector.)

Speaking from Michigan, Mrs D’Arms said: “Andrew Wylie was interested in building areas where we had been a bit concerned that not much was happening. Evelyn Waugh is much less known in this country than he is in England.”

PFD said: “We will continue to maintain good and open relations as we continue to manage the existing contracts.”

He swoops to conquer

— Andrew Wylie, above, was born on November 4, 1947, the son of an editor at a Boston publishers. He studied French literature at Harvard

— After hanging out with Andy Warhol in New York, he created his literary agency in 1980 and signed up more than 600 clients

— “What we were trying to do was to represent quality with the same kind of discipline that had been brought to the representation of bestsellers,” he explained

— He hired a cousin of Martin Amis before poaching the author from a rival agency. He also represents Isabel Fonseca, the second Mrs Amis

— Wylie’s poaching comes as a Waugh revival is expected from the imminent release of a film version of Brideshead Revisited starring Ben Whishaw and Emma Thompson

— Tibor Fischer dismissed him as an agent after complaining about his “quite astonishing attitude towards photocopying charges”

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