Jeffrey Archer, novelist whose real life rivalled his thrillers, dies at 86

[LONDON] Jeffrey Archer, a best-selling British author, politician, philanthropist, athlete and one-time jailbird, whose resume seesawed between achievement and disgrace, and who inspired abiding public fascination with headline-grabbing accounts, both fictional and personal, of ambition, self-promotion, misbehaviour and scandal, died on Monday (Oct 5) at his home in London. He was 86.

His publisher, HarperCollins, announced his death. His final novel, Adam and Eve, about the intertwined destinies of the highborn and the humble, was scheduled for publication on Tuesday.

Archer’s thrillers and sagas of the rich and powerful sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. In his London apartment overlooking the Thames, the walls were adorned with paintings, including works by Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso.

As a host there, he became known for annual celebrity parties. He also maintained homes in Mallorca and in the village of Grantchester outside Cambridge, England. Routinely, he was reported to borrow the overseas homes of wealthy friends and acquaintances to compose the multiple first drafts of his novels.

In his days as a politician – both as a member of parliament in the elected House of Commons and as deputy head of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party – he displayed a barely veiled hunger for the top job.

His friendships and alliances eventually won him a place in the unelected House of Lords with the title baron archer of Weston-super-Mare – his childhood hometown in south-west England.

A political Houdini, he survived many vicissitudes, including a perjury conviction in 2001 when he was found guilty of creating false diaries and concocting a story to win a trial over whether he had slept with a prostitute to whom he paid hush money.

He once said that politics was his first choice of career, but it was from his 40-plus books that he amassed wealth, starting with a novel entitled Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, published in 1976 after he had been defrauded of his personal fortune and stepped down as a lawmaker.

“I was so low I would have sold fake Gucci bags on street corners,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “Once you’ve lost a million dollars, you may as well have lost a hundred million dollars.”

SEE ALSO

Sam Neill, Jurassic Park star, dies at 78

A former public relations man, he turned to writing thrillers and found he had an immediate skill for quick action that connected with readers.

His first published novel told the story of four men who banded together to defraud a con man who had robbed them of US$1 million each.

Like the works that were to follow, the novel drew condescending criticism from some writers boasting more elevated literary credentials and less-padded bank accounts.

Archer described himself as a storyteller, a qualification which he depicted as unusual and the object of resentment.

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

Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in London on Apr 15, 1940, and grew up in Weston-super-Mare. His mother was Lola (Cook) Archer, a journalist with a column in a local newspaper.

Archer gave conflicting accounts of his father, William, who was 40 years older than his mother. He sometimes called him a “printer”, although by some accounts he was a bigamist and a fraudster. Either way, he was not much of a presence in his son’s life and died when Jeffrey was 11.

Archer was educated on a scholarship at a school in the county of Somerset and left with limited qualifications to train with the police and the army. He taught physical education at a school in the south-east and went on in 1963 to study for a diploma in education at the University of Oxford.

At Oxford, he showed a flair for athletics as a sprinter and a hurdler – running for the university and for his country – and for philanthropy, fundraising on behalf of the non-profit Oxfam.

He went into public relations and fundraising and, in 1966, he married an Oxford chemistry undergraduate, Mary Weeden. In addition to his wife, who became a chemistry professor at the University of Cambridge, he is survived by two sons, William and James; and five grandchildren.

In his books, Archer showed a liking for multi-volume series of novels revolving around central characters, such as the seven-book Clifton Chronicles charting the life and times of Harry Clifton, the son of a dockworker in south-west England, and an equally ambitious series of books such as An Eye for an Eye (2024).

Even in non-fiction, Archer turned two years spent in prison for perjury into a three-volume memoir called A Prison Diary.

His jail term had its roots in a case in 1987, when Archer filed a libel suit against the tabloid Daily Star after it reported that he had slept with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. Archer won the case and was awarded £500,000 pounds (US$660,647) in damages.

In 1992, with the support of Conservative backers including Thatcher and then prime minister John Major, he was ennobled as lord archer.

In 1999, he became the Conservative candidate in elections to choose a mayor of London despite never-proven allegations that he had used insider information in a deal to buy shares in Anglia Television five years earlier.

But before the vote was held, another newspaper, The News of the World, reported allegations that Archer had committed perjury at the original libel trial in 1987, forcing him to withdraw from the mayoral race.

Those charges came to trial in September 2000 and, in July 2001, he was given a four-year jail term for perjury and perverting the course of justice. After two years in a variety of correctional institutions, he was released, resuming his career as a prolific writer. He kept his title and retired from the House of Lords in 2024. NYTIMES