The literary agent is one of the stock characters of post-war British prose.

Debonair, limpid and usually a public school gent of a certain vintage, the literary agent mollifies his temperamental clients and serves as midwife to their creative labour pains, all within the operating theatre of London’s clubland. It tended to be the favoured pursuit of those with independent means, because commissions on books that took years to write were small and disbursed in instalments.

In Scotland, the breed expired with Giles Gordon, who died in a fall at his home in 2003 — a point in time at which new realities were beginning to dawn in the world of publishing and pragmatic and inclusive responses were urgently required.

Today, the noteworthy agents in Scotland tend to be female — Maggie McKernan, Gordon’s widow, and Jenny Brown — and their hunting grounds are the fertile plains of university creative writing courses. As publishers strip-mine for viable new talent, literature has become a seller’s market. Since 2004, Hodder Headline has had a talent-spotting office in Paisley — some considerable distance, least of all geographically, from the Garrick.

This week saw a new agenting homburg thrown into the ring, that of Judy Moir, formerly an editorial director at Canongate, for whom she developed Michel Faber, Louise Welsh and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, a Man Booker prize-winner and the first Scottish-published book to sell more than a million copies.

More recently Moir, 51, was head of Penguin’s ill-starred Scottish operation, whose greatest success was getting James Robertson’s grim Presbyterian anti-thriller The Testament of Gideon Mack on to the Richard and Judy Book Club.

Hopes were raised then dashed by Penguin’s brief paddle in the Scottish literary pond. Since the arrival of Trainspotting in 1993, the publishing establishment in London has blown hot and cold on Scotland, mounting the occasional crusade for talent here, then abating to ready themselves for the next short-lived campaign. At the time of writing, the spotlight of decentralisation has swivelled on to Ireland, where several satellite publishing operations have recently opened.

The sojourn of Penguin at Moir’s office was perhaps the most egregious example of this imperial pen-teasing — we’d long to know what the waspish Giles Gordon would have made of it.

An indomitable and cheerful sort, however, Moir is made of more diplomatic stuff.

“It still isn’t entirely clear to me why we were shut down,” she says of Pengion’s withdrawal. “We’d had four very productive years, particularly the last year when TheTestament of Gideon Mack outsold The Inheritance of Loss [by Kiran Desai], which had won the Booker.

“Being closed down was the last thing I anticipated. But I have to be philosophical about it and move on. The taste for Scottish writing hits the London publishers in waves, I think. But Penguin gave me a very fair redundancy package, which allowed me to go on holiday and gather my thoughts.

“There are no jobs for life any more and certainly not in publishing.”

The Penguin episode, however, was a brief chapter compared with Moir’s 16 years at Canongate, the independent publisher run now, but not when Moir joined, by the ebullient, hip aristo Jamie Byng.

Byng, Moir and the editorial committee steered the company from penury as a publisher of small-run specialist-interest Scottish titles into one of Britain’s most respected general publishers.

Their achievements were crowned in 2002 when Life of Pi, poached in a last-minute deal from Faber for an advance of £15,000, won the Man Booker prize.

It should have been the advent of a new era for Canongate, the ultimate David and Goliath publishing triumph, but for Moir the victory was the beginning of the end.

“I’d been there too long,” she says, “and winning the Booker created all kinds of strange energies at Canongate. We were flooded with manuscripts from all over the world.

“It became very hard to cope with success. Things just always fall apart at a certain stage of their lives. We weren’t getting on the way we used to.”

The standard reading in literary circles of the dissolution of the Byng-Moir partnership centres on the imbalance created by Byng’s burgeoning media profile, which carried with it an implication that it was he who did the spadework in finding and developing new talent for the company.

Asked about a personality clash with Moir, Byng once remarked: “Clashes, plural.”

Moir was vexed in particular by Byng’s perceived preference after the success of Life of Pi — whose author, Martel, is Canadian — for writers from around the globe, to the detriment of the native authors Canongate was initially founded to promote.

She spoke out in 2004 when Byng selected a second Canadian novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji, as its entry for the following year’s Booker.

The consensus within Scottish publishing is that Byng is an unrivalled salesman, but is also messianic and mercurial in his enthusiasms, a tendency that sits awkwardly in the sedate world of publishing, particularly now that shrinking profit margins necessitate considerable caution.

For Moir, meanwhile, acting as an agent gives her the opportunity to get in on the ground level of a book, helping to shape it from the outset rather than picking and packaging completed titles.

Raised in Zimbabwe by her doctor father, Leon Nussbaum, and her mother, Becky, she went to the University of Edinburgh and married fellow publisher and Canongate alumnus Neville Moir (four years ago the couple were named the 23rd most influential in Scotland).

Her publishing apprenticeships were undertaken as a director of the Edinburgh Book Festival and at the Scottish Publishers Association, a trade association funded by the Scottish Arts Council to promote the country’s publishing industry, with stints at Mainstream, Jonathan Cape and Little Brown.

As yet, however, there are no clients for her new agency and little likelihood that the authors who she helped nurture — among them Welsh, Faber, Martel and James Meek — will follow her.

Her plan is to open her in-tray to all-comers, secure in the knowledge that, as the man who famously chose not to sign the Beatles discovered, the next big thing often comes in the most unpromising of guises.

“Giles Gordon, for example, totally missed Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White,” she says. “To pay him back, Michel wrote him into the book as the client of a brothel.”

Another problem that Moir faces is the assumption, still a subtext in the views held of Scottish writing in the metropolitan press, that the urban gothic still maintains its grip on authors, and that most new Scottish writing has yet to escape the shadow cast by the easily imitated tropes of Trainspotting.

“You could equally say it shed light on the Scottish condition,” says Moir of the style.

“There are those who have been influenced by Irvine Welsh, but many new writers are doing something completely different, like Kevin MacNeil in The Stornoway Way, where the literary style is more akin to Joycean word play.

“Or take Alexander McCall Smith, I doubt that Trainspotting had any effect whatsoever on his wonderfully gentle, humane novels.”

The corollary of being a literary agent, of course, will be Moir’s ceaseless exposure to the screeds of dreck that the misguided literary aspirants of Scotland are certain to deluge her with. As she readily admits, writing fiction is a deceptively difficult task, bordering for most on the near impossible.

“These days if you want to find new talent you have to scour the grass roots. It’s the only way,” she says. “Publishers now won’t take unsolicited manuscripts, so the slush piles build up in the offices of agents.

“I never read too many scripts in the same day because that dulls the receptivity. I read everything as if it’s a published book that someone has sent to me. The really awful ones you can tell within the first few words.

“And if all else fails, I have a method for clearing my head of the rubbish — I read George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. It’s the one sure cure for too much bad writing . . .”

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy