Dead writers are hot this summer. No point wasting one’s time with new authors. They’re unpredictable, demanding. They require lunch. No, what any literary agent worth his salt needs in 2008 is a classic author with form: famous, prolific and deceased within the past 70 years.

In recent months, the literary estate - the body of work belonging to a dead author - has suddenly and unexpectedly become big business. Since Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, an American literary agent, wrested the Evelyn Waugh estate from the London agency PFD in 2007, then nicked Vladmir Nabokov from Smith-Skolnik earlier this summer, British agents have been falling over each other to protect their own estates and sign new ones.

Indeed, in the wake of the Waugh debacle, PFD appointed a single agent, Marcella Edwards, primarily to manage its estates. She says that, within a month, PFD will announce the bagging of the estate of “a very big British author”.

Meanwhile, its hated rival, United Agents - an organisation established last year by ex-PFD staffers, with whom PFD is currently locked in a legal battle over backlist revenue - has pipped it to the post. United announced the arrival of Ian Fleming’s estate on Monday.

What’s going on? Until recently, literary estates were a cottage industry, handled by executors - a grandchild or a spouse, say - in a more or less dilatory fashion. While the work was in copyright (for 70 years after the author’s death) the family would reply to correspondence, renew rights and preserve the writer’s good name. If the estate was represented, it was by the same agent who represented the author during his lifetime. One did not poach dead people.

It now seems the rules have changed. The playground accusation of some British agents is that “Wylie started it”, which does not explain why so many have followed his example. Agencies are businesses. They do not promote authors for fun. Estates, meanwhile, are notoriously hard work to manage. Why are they now so attractive?

It is easy to see why some - like Fleming’s - have garnered jealous looks from agents. His backlist contains 14 Bond books, the children’s novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and a series of lucrative Bond homages, most notably Sebastian Faulks’s recent Devil May Care, which has sold more than 100,000 in hardback since its release in late May.

Simon Trewin, of United Agents, who now represents the estate (with the notable exception of the Faulks book and Samantha Weinberg’s Moneypenny Diaries, which remain with rival agent Aitken Alexander), is cock-a-hoop. “I’m going to treat this in the same way I’d treat a living client,” he says. “It’s going to be, happily, very time-consuming. It’s difficult to think of a more active estate. Bond books have sold more than 100m copies since they were written, and I think it’s fair to say 60% of those after Fleming died.”

Before, Ian Fleming Publications Limited (IFPL) employed agents as consultants. They have now taken on someone full time because, as Corinne Turner, director of IFPL, says, there are “huge opportunities out there for an estate like this”.

For huge opportunities, read huge profits. Yet not every estate is so lucrative. Wylie’s acquisition of Nabokov, for instance, seems to make more sense than Waugh. At least the Nabokov estate has a new book – an unpublished novella, The Original of Laura, which until recently was locked in a family safe, despite the author’s dying wish for the story, written on index cards, to be burnt. Wylie expects it to be published “in America, then internationally” next autumn.

The value of Waugh is harder to fathom. Although a forthcoming BBC Films adaptation of Brideshead Revisited will give the books a welcome fillip, Wylie does not represent the author’s film rights. That plum task falls to United’s Anthony Jones, who will not say how much the producers of the most recently revisited Brideshead paid for the rights, observing only that “you don’t sell classics cheap”. (It is likely to be considerably more than the $140,000 MGM offered Waugh for the same book in 1946.) Another blow for Wylie is that Waugh’s publishing deals are largely cemented. So how will the estate make him money?

“Actually, it’s easy to see where the value resides,” Wylie says. “Many estates, when they come to us, have been neglected. The foreign rights, for instance, are spottily managed. And we take care of a lot of small problems on an international basis: that’s the specialité de la maison. It’s like walking into a house that hasn’t been cleaned in a decade. We strip the bed, put on new sheets, fluff up the pillows, clean the kitchen - and suddenly the house increases in value.”

One of the many rumours about Wylie is that he takes on famous clients, dead or alive, as “name plates” to attract others. It was, for instance, the signing of Benazir Bhutto that encouraged Salman Rushdie to join his agency. A number in his industry believe that Waugh was bait for another author. Who? “The way we see it is that the writers and estates we represent are like a spider’s web,” Wylie says, without answering the question. “They all have connections. And you have to be equally attentive to everyone, whether they are worth £8,000 a year or £800,000.” So, what about the rumour that Waugh was bait for the Graham Greene estate? “Of course,” Wylie says. “I’m particularly interested in Graham Greene.”

It was in the wake of Waugh’s departure to Wylie that PFD appointed Edwards. She is coltishly enthusiastic about reviving the agency’s lost authors, particularly those, such as Storm Jameson and Frank O’Connor, who she believes could have great popular appeal. Some rivals put PFD’s new enthusiasm for estates down to the fact that they have lost all their good living authors (Julian Barnes and Nick Hornby, for example) to United. Edwards, naturally, sees it differently. “The amazing thing is, people never used to take this seriously,” she says. “I think estates are the most important part of the agenting business. They are the jewel in the crown for us. People talk about them being ‘backlist’. They are not - they are absolutely ‘frontlist’ authors.”

Edwards promises an “American approach” to estates at PFD. She wants to see writers exploited across different media and looks, particularly, for the work of forgotten authors on her backlist to be adapted for film or television by a screenwriter in the same agency. The agency thereby pockets two lots of commission – one from the estate and one from the adaptation. “It’s not rocket science,” she says, “but it takes a lot of work and lateral thinking.”

It also takes lateral thinking to understand the impetus behind this trend. Is the land-grab for estates simply about money? Or is it a symptom of some deeper shift in attitudes? Joel Rickett, of The Bookseller magazine, is reassuringly cynical. “Hollywood and TV have had the nostalgia bug for some time, and an adaptation can give an author’s backlist a huge lease of life,” he says. “That’s driven the recent splurge in ‘classics’ ranges of books. Also, in bookselling, there’s been a shift back towards recognised authors. It’s harder and harder to sell a new name. In a supermarket, you need your book to have instant brand recognition. A dead author with a recognised name is gold dust.”

The boom in “classics” has had a noticeably benevolent effect at the less commercial end of the business, too. Faber’s elegant “lost classics” series, Faber Finds, has sought to republish out-of-print works from the 20th century on a print-on-demand basis. It has given authors who were deeply influential at the time of their work, such as FR Leavis, a welcome return to the spotlight. “This is not some get-rich-quick gimmick,” explains John Seaton, editor of Faber Finds. “It is gradual, incremental business. But it’s also an exciting, good thing to be doing.”

Jeremy Lewis, the biographer and sometime publisher who is currently writing about the family of Graham Greene, thinks Faber Finds is a sunny, if quietly influential, sideshow compared to the murkier aspirations of the industry at large. “This is, on the face of it, an odd trend,” he says. “Backlist sales have been doing so badly in recent years. The traditional orthodoxy is that publishers are not all that interested in backlists - they’re deadwood. It doesn’t make sense, except for the fact that publishers and agents are tremendously sheeplike. So, when someone like Wylie, who is a trendsetter, starts muscling in on estates, everyone does it. He has panicked the sheep.”

If an agent wanted to make serious money out of an estate, Lewis contends, one could do better than Waugh. What keen agencies should be looking for is either an active, imaginative estate such as Fleming or a forgotten author whose books are out of print, but might be ripe for a television or film revival. “What you need,” he says, “is a good nose. It’s one of the reasons I was such a bad publisher.”

The noses of the publishing industry are sniffing, all right. And, while they search for backlist gems, the jockeying for position over which dead author belongs to whom will continue. As they do so, many agents will be happy to take a ringside seat. Indeed, Charlie Campbell, of the Ed Victor agency, admits to finding the new obsession with estates baffling. “We look after a number of estates - Iris Murdoch, Douglas Adams and so on - but the difference is, we looked after them in their lifetime,” he says. “There’s enormous affection for them here. Pinching them from another agency would leave an empty feeling.”

Some agencies, it seems, are willing to live with a little emptiness. Nabbing a rival’s prized estate may be, like Woody Allen’s loveless sex, “a meaningless experience - but as far as meaningless experiences go, it’s pretty damn good”.

Still going strong: the literary estates every agent wants

1 JRR Tolkien Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the forthcoming film of The Hobbit have reinvigorated interest in Tolkein’s grandiose fiction. While the estate battles with New Line for a share of the movie profits, the books’ popularity remains undimmed.

2 Agatha Christie The “bestselling author of all time” would be a handy client to represent. The entertainment-brands company Chorion paid £10m for the rights to her work in 1998. It was a steal.

3 Ian Fleming Forget a licence to kill: the Fleming estate has a licence to print money. The continuing popularity of the Bond films and the estate’s ability to persuade authors to write homages has made the author’s value balloon.

4 TS Eliot While challenging works such as The Waste Land offer few “branding opportunities” for sharp-eyed agents, this estate is bolstered by the continuing financial success of Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of Eliot’s poems.

5 Roald Dahl Dahl’s books continue to delight and disgust children everywhere. Films such as the most recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory show that the author’s popularity, and the value of his estate, is as strong as ever.

6 Graham Greene Greene’s estate, described by a publisher as having “huge potential”, includes Brighton Rock and The Third Man. Perhaps that explains why the agent Andrew Wylie is so keen to get his hands on it.

7 Enid Blyton Another children’s author whose backlist is owned by Chorion, Blyton still sells 1m Famous Five books worldwide every year. That’s without considering Malory Towers, the Secret Seven, Noddy or Amelia Jane. A huge estate.

8 CS Lewis The Narnia films have prompted a new enthusiasm for Lewis’s books. With the advent of Prince Caspian, expect more children to succumb to his Christian-infused fairy stories.

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