A Life of Victories and Dishonor

First it was Peter May, now it’s Jeffrey Archer. I just returned to my office after a few days away to discover this news. From The Guardian:

Jeffrey Archer, the bestselling author and former MP whose political career ended in disgrace when he was imprisoned for perjury, has died at the age of 86.

Archer, who was a Conservative MP for five years before serving as the party’s deputy chair, died “suddenly and peacefully” at his home “between writing sessions” on Monday, his publisher HarperCollins said.

The newspaper goes on to quote Archer’s editor, Kate Elton, as saying:

“He was the master storyteller and an editor’s dream—phenomenally hard-working, utterly committed to completing draft after draft to get every word as perfect as possible, and a true champion of the team nature of great publishing.”

Archer’s death came just one day before the publication of his new novel, Adam and Eve, on Tuesday 6 October.

His first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, was published in 1976, two years after bankruptcy marked the end of his time as a sitting MP. This marked the beginning of an enviable writing career. Archer spent a total of 14 years and five months on the Sunday Times bestseller lists and over five years on the New York Times bestseller lists, selling 300 million books in 119 countries in 49 languages.

But as noted above, the London-born thriller writer did not live a high life of successes without scandal.

During a run to become mayor of London for the Conservatives in 1999, his political career was in effect ended when it emerged he had lied in court over a decade earlier when a newspaper accused him of paying money to a sex worker. He was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and imprisoned for four years.

An Old Bailey jury found that he had lied in a libel action he had brought against the Star newspaper in 1987 in which he had been awarded £500,000 in damages.

He was released early in 2003 and returned to the House of Lords until he retired in 2024.

I admit, I haven’t cracked open a Jeffrey Archer novel in many years. However, he clearly didn’t require my attention to prosper greatly. As The New York Times recalls in its own Archer obituary, the author “described himself as a storyteller, a qualification which he depicted as both unusual and the object of resentment.

“Storytellers are very rare, but they create a lot of envy,” Mr. Archer said in an interview with fellow author Anthony Horowitz for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine in 2011. “The people who survive are storytellers.”

The interview evoked some of the ambiguities and passions surrounding Mr. Archer’s work, which drew on themes such as power, rivalry, ambition and greed.

“I’m painfully aware that of the two writers in the room only one has an original Monet on the wall,” Mr. Horowitz wrote, referring to the location of the interview in his subject’s apartment. He noted that Mr. Archer’s 1979 novel, Kane & Abel, which sold more than 50 million copies since its publication in 1979, helped fund his art collection.

The Guardian adds that Archer’s demise, from causes not yet reported, “came less than 24 hours after [he] had met and signed books for hundreds of fans at a sold-out event with broadcaster Gyles Brandreth at the Leicester Square Theatre in central London on Sunday.”