Susan Hill

The editor and writer Susan Hill, who has died of throat cancer aged 53, was not born Susan Hill, and it was a pity that another name had not been chosen, because, working in publishing, she had to start more conversations than she would have wished explaining that she was not Susan Hill the novelist. Her original name was Carmel Vermilion O'Leary, but she was adopted at a very early age and raised by a couple who, in later life, she never referred to as anything but "Mr and Mrs Hill".

It was not a relaxed childhood, as Hill and her brother (also adopted) were coerced in the bourgeois gentility of St Albans. But, as a result of that early training, her wild-child tendencies, and the recurrent kamikaze streak in Susan's character, were always tempered by extra-ordinary politeness. Her friends' lives were punctuated by cards of thanks, and phone calls of (usually unnecessary) apology.

Educated at Watford grammar school for girls, Susan worked first as a trainee journalist on local newspapers, and as a music journalist for magazines such as Melody Maker. She got a job at Granada Publishing, and then became an editor at Hutchinson in 1979, which was when I first met her.

In many ways, her career reflected the changes which affected publishing in the 1980s and 90s. She transferred in 1985 to Sidgwick & Jackson, which was later subsumed into the Macmillan empire. Gradually, the number of days per week she worked tapered off, and she moved at the end of the 1990s into a successful career as a freelance editor and ghostwriter.

She was, in fact, the kind of editor who is now an endangered species - the kind who had sudden, mad ideas for books, and would try to find the right author to carry them through. She would admire someone's work in journalism or another field, and approach them to see if they had any book ideas. One of my own collaborations with her was characteristic of this approach.

In 1988, Susan noticed that the Booker Prize would be 20 years old the following year, and she thought this anniversary deserved some celebration. Being Susan, she also thought that the best form of celebration would be a humorous novel. Over lunch - inevitably - we discussed the idea, and she engagingly said to me, "The really important thing about this book is that it's written by someone who has absolutely no chance of winning the Booker Prize himself." Recognising myself from the profile, I agreed to take the job, and The Booker Book was published. Both the people who bought it really liked it.

But Susan also edited massively successful books. After working on the book for Live Aid, she masterminded the bestselling life-story of Bob Geldof, with one of the best titles an autobiography ever had, Is That It? She worked with Boy George, Lynda la Plante, Lord Deedes and the gangster Charlie Richardson, whom she interviewed in Parkhurst prison. Later in her career, she helped ghostwrite a successful book about a psychologist's analysis of the royal family.

Susan could always combine popularism with a fine intellectual approach to her work. Personally, like most interesting people, she was a depressive bundle of neuroses. Deeply shy, she hated speaking in public, and was terrified by the prospect of having to say anything at the launch of a book into which she had invested so much energy. She could not bear the idea of sitting in a restaurant when she did not have her back to the wall. Or, indeed, one in which she was not allowed to smoke.

But in spite of all her quirks, Susan had a unique capacity to inspire friendship. She conducted a fairly exotic love life, with some very high-profile lovers and one shortlived and disastrous marriage, but she never lost touch with her friends.

Unusually for a woman who was very attractive to men, she had as many female friends as male. It should be said that she looked stunning. The combination of dark brown hair and troubled, navy blue eyes cut straight through many a masculine heart. And though she affected a studied scruffiness, her idiosyncratic dress sense was always spot on. She had style.

Susan lived discreetly among different circles of friends, and occasionally - though rarely - those circles overlapped. When they did, probably uniquely at a splendid party for her 50th birthday, what all her friends turned out to have in common was an unquestioning love for her.

· Susan Hill (Carmel Vermilion O'Leary), editor and writer, born November 9 1950; died May 18 2004

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