Jeffrey Archer: The Man Who Lived His Plots
If there was no Jeffrey Archer, would there be Hrithik Roshan the superstar? In 1987, Rakesh Roshan made his first movie as a filmmaker using a plot overwhelmingly borrowed from Archer’s 1979 bestseller Kane and Abel. Khudgarz became a superhit and made Roshan one of Bollywood’s most successful filmmakers who would eventually launch his son. Not that Archer was happy about books of his being made into movies in India. These were not bought with rights and he got nothing from them. The phenomenon would continue decades later with a 2011 movie titled Ladies vs Ricky Bahl, Ranveer Singh’s second as a hero. Archer accused it of taking from him without permission.
Bollywood loved Archer’s books because they were exactly the kind of stories it relished. Memorable characters, rags-to-riches stories, wars between the powerful, thrills and plot twists, the triumph of good, all in pages that kept you relentlessly immersed. Three years before Kane and Abel in 1976, Archer published his first book Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less about four men joining forces to get back the money they had been defrauded of. It was based on a scam that had not only robbed him of everything but also left him deep in debt.
Archer was born in 1940 to a conman father who rarely figured in his life. He got some of that flamboyance, and put it to good use in legitimate ways. At Oxford, he was a national-level athlete and already hobnobbing with celebrities. By his late 20s, Archer was one of the youngest members of parliament. After going broke, he did not contest again and instead turned to writing where his success was even more extraordinary. Kane and Abel remains his biggest seller with over 30 million in total sales but many of his books sold in seven figures. Altogether, they clocked more than 300 million copies.
His life would mirror the kind of twists his books were replete with. Once established as a bestselling writer, he returned to politics and rose to be the deputy chairman of the ruling Conservative Party. In 1987, he successfully sued a tabloid that had published an exposé of him engaging with a sex worker. Twelve years later, just as he was running to be the mayor of London, another tabloid ran a story of how he had committed perjury in the libel suit and asked a friend to provide him an alibi. A criminal trial now followed and he was sent to jail for four years, eventually serving two. Once in prison, he immediately began writing a memoir in three volumes, A Prison Diary, and used it to settle scores with the judge he thought had unfairly sentenced him. It became a bestseller too.
His writing made him enormously wealthy, but he was many things rolled into one, someone who relished being in the thick of public life. Indians, in an age before the internet and social media, couldn’t get enough of his books. Pirated copies used to be ubiquitous when hawkers sold them on streets.
Archer had no pretensions about his works being literary fiction. What he was aspiring to was great storytelling and he was an absolute success at it. Also, at never folding under what life threw at him. After his jail stint, there was no diminishment in social status or popular appeal. He kept churning out books. They might not have had the readership of his peak but the following remained strong. He was 86 and every moment had been fully lived. When he died on October 5, it was one day before the publication of his latest book, Adam & Eve.