Jeffrey Archer spent a lifetime turning reversals into comebacks. On 5 October, the author who survived bankruptcy, political disgrace and prison died at 86, reportedly between writing sessions at his home, just a day before the release of what was to be his final novel, Adam and Eve.
It was an ending almost too neat for a life as improbable as Archer’s. He was a best-selling novelist, former MP and member of the House of Lords, but also a convicted perjurer. Time and again, the scandals that threatened to finish him became material for another chapter and often another book.
Archer was one of those people who could only fail upwards, no matter what he did. Born into a modest family with an absent father, Archer was raised by his mother, a journalist. He earned a scholarship to the prestigious Wellington School in Somerset and later to Oxford University.
But what birth couldn’t provide, brains and ambition did. At Oxford, he started fundraising for charity. In fact, his efforts to raise money for Oxfam even grabbed the attention of The Beatles, who agreed to visit the campus. He even put up posters across Oxford saying, “Jeffrey Archer presents The Beatles in concert.”
One of his friends, Sheridan Morley, recounted Ringo Starr of The Beatles saying of Archer, “He strikes me as a nice enough fella, but he’s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it.” Which, to an extent, summed up the man.
After university, he entered fundraising and then, before long, turned to politics. He even opened an art gallery in London’s Mayfair (Spoiler: he sold it after two years).
By 29, he was a member of Parliament. A big feat for a boy from nowhere with no name. Despite being the victim of a Ponzi scheme and his subsequent bankruptcy, Archer had nowhere to go but up…and that is exactly what he did.
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His 1976 novel Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was inspired by his real-life near-bankruptcy; the novel also helped him climb out of financial ruin.
It was the first instance of Archer using his less-than-glamorous life to his advantage, not that it is by any means problematic or even frowned upon. However, it did forever entangle the literary with the scandalous. How anyone can ever look at one without the other is a near impossibility.
While he may have revamped the thriller and mystery genre and given a new lease of life to historical fiction, the invisible, but sometimes glaringly obvious, thread to his scandals remained.
The 1984 novel First Among Equals also took inspiration from Archer’s life and times in the British House of Commons. Even his short story collection A Twist in the Tale (1988) was inspired by urban legends. Archer did what all creative writing professors have been preaching for years now: write what you know. He did it with his best-selling series The Clifton Chronicles (2011-2016) and The Short, the Long and the Tall (2020). Perhaps Bridget Jones was right when she compared his writing to Salman Rushdie’s and hurriedly added, “And yours, Lord Archer, aren’t bad either,” in the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary.
He proved time and again that a public figure need not be terribly financially savvy or even a kin of Shakespeare to be a best-seller. He need only be somewhat popular with a propensity for scandal and hijinks.
But his “legacy” also shows the unrelenting spirit of man. Especially a man who refuses to give up or back down. For Jeffery Archer, whenever life gave him lemons, he simply made a new novel out of it.
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(Edited by Ratan Priya)