Jeffrey Archer Dies at 86: A Tribute to Britain's Great Storyteller
Jeffrey Archer died last night at 86. He sold more than 300 million books, and he never once pretended to be anything other than what he was: a man who wanted you to turn the page.
That sounds like a small ambition. It isn’t. Plenty of literary novelists have spent careers trying to hold a reader the way Archer held millions of them on trains, on beaches, in hospital waiting rooms. He made it look easy. He worked at it like a miner.
He wrote his way out of ruin
The origin story is pure Archer. In 1974 he was a young Conservative MP for Louth, he’d put his money into a Canadian company that turned out to be a fraud, and he was facing bankruptcy. He stood down from Parliament. Then he sat down and wrote a novel about four men swindled by a crooked financier who decide to get every penny back.
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less came out in 1976. It paid the debts. It also launched one of the most improbable second careers in British public life.
Three years later came Kane and Abel, the book most people will mention first today. Two men born on the same day on opposite sides of the world, one into Boston money and one into nothing in Poland, and a rivalry that runs for sixty years. It’s a big, unashamed, old-fashioned saga. It went to number one in America and became a television miniseries. Archer himself named it the book that changed his life, and it’s hard to argue.
The discipline behind the page-turner
Archer had a reputation as a showman, and he was one. But the working habits were monkish. He wrote by hand, in long blocks of hours starting early in the morning, and he’d take a book through a dozen drafts or more. He liked to say the first draft was only the beginning.
You can feel that in the books. The Prodigal Daughter. First Among Equals, his Westminster novel, which knew exactly how Parliament smelled. A Prisoner of Birth, his Monte Cristo. The seven-book Clifton Chronicles, which kept readers hooked for years. And late in life, the William Warwick detective series, written by a man in his eighties who still wanted to know what happens next.
The short stories deserve a mention too. A Quiver Full of Arrows, A Twist in the Tale. Archer loved a sting in the last line, and he was very good at it.
A life more plotted than his novels
You can’t write about Archer honestly and skip the rest. Deputy chairman of the Conservative Party under Thatcher. A life peerage in 1992. Then, in 2001, a perjury conviction and a prison sentence, for lying in a libel case he had won years earlier.
Most people would have gone quiet. Archer wrote A Prison Diary, then two more volumes of it, and turned his time inside into some of his most observed writing. He was, as his publishers liked to point out, the only author to hit number one in fiction, short stories and non-fiction.
That was the pattern. Every fall became material. Every comeback became a chapter.
He was married to Mary Archer, the scientist, for six decades. They had two sons. He spent years as a charity auctioneer, raising money at hundreds of events with the same patter he brought to a book launch.
The last book
Archer said in January that Adam and Eve, out this month, would be his final novel. He was 85 when he finished it and told his publishers he’d never equal it again. Fifty years after his debut, he planned his exit like one of his own endings.
He got to write it. Not everyone does.
Critics never quite forgave him for being popular, and he never quite cared. The readers stayed. They’re the ones who’ll be pulling Kane and Abel off the shelf tonight.
Goodnight, Lord Archer. One more chapter.