Jeffrey Archer, 1940 to 2026: the storyteller who always came back

Jeffrey Archer, 1940 to 2026: the storyteller who always came back

Jeffrey Archer died at his home in Cambridge on Monday 5 October, aged 86, between writing sessions. The day before, he had been on stage at the Leicester Square Theatre with Gyles Brandreth, signing books and talking about Adam & Eve, the novel he had declared would be his last. It was published the following morning, and he was due at Cheltenham on Saturday. Had his editor found that sequence in a manuscript, she would have struck it out as being far too neat and convenient.

Neat endings were his trade, and his first one was born of necessity. Elected Conservative MP for Louth in 1969, he left the Commons five years later on the edge of bankruptcy and turned the calamity into Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. It is a caper about four men fleeced by a crooked financier who set out to fleece him back, to the penny. It appeared in 1976. Three years later came Kane and Abel, two men born on the same day at opposite ends of the world, and the bestseller lists never quite let him go. More than 300 million copies of his books have been sold.

His life ran alongside the fiction and frequently outpaced it. There was a peerage, a spell as deputy chairman of his party and then, in 2001, a perjury conviction and two years in prison. He promptly turned the prison years into three volumes of diaries. Readers who disapproved of the man kept buying the books regardless, which tells you most of what you need to know about his work.

What they were buying was story, told without ornament. Archer liked to divide novelists into writers and storytellers, and claimed to be trying to be both. He wrote everything by hand, often through multiple drafts before his publisher saw a page. The result reads as though it was effortless, which is the hardest trick in the business: short chapters, with cliffhangers laid like tripwires at the end of each.

The Clifton Chronicles

His most ambitious work runs to seven volumes and opens in Bristol in 1920. Harry Clifton grows up in the shadow of the docks, told that his father died in the war. Twenty years later he learns otherwise, and the question of whether he is a docker's son or the firstborn of the family behind the Barrington Shipping Line carries the saga through the century. Only Time Will Tell takes Harry from boyhood to 1940 and a choice between Oxford and the navy. Comparisons with the Forsyte Saga are usual, and fair. This is a family chronicle with a thriller writer's sense of timing.

William Warwick

Late in life, Archer created a detective, and an endearing one. William Warwick is an art history graduate who joins the Metropolitan Police over his father's objections. In Nothing Ventured, he lands on Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques squad, chasing a Rembrandt stolen from the Fitzmolean Museum and an unscrupulous collector named Miles Faulkner, while losing his heart to Beth, a researcher at the gallery. In Hidden in Plain Sight, he is made Detective Sergeant and moved to the Drugs Squad, hunting a South London trafficker known as the Viper. In Turn a Blind Eye, he goes undercover inside the Met itself, shadowing a young officer whose taste in living far outruns his salary. Faulkner has a habit of turning up again, a talent his creator would have recognised.

The man who rewrote everything fourteen times got his final chapter right at the first attempt. The world is a poorer place without him.