Remembering Jeffrey Archer, Writer (and Experiencer) of High Drama

Famously, some writers write interesting stories instead of living interesting lives. Emily Dickinson reportedly didn’t get out much. Marcel Proust was a guy who laid around inside a lot writing books about a guy who lays around inside a lot. Thomas Pynchon isn’t out there skydiving and white water rafting, as far as we know, although really who can say for sure?

There are, of course, exceptions: your Hemingways, your Hunter S. Thompsons, your Graham Greenes. And for a more recent example, consider the mega-best-selling British novelist Jeffrey Archer, who died October 5 at the age of 86. Archer was so extravagantly successful as a writer of thrillers that he owned original Picassos and maintained multiple luxury homes around the world. (Compare that with some other authors, who consider themselves pretty fancy if they own a second sports jacket.) His novel Kane and Abel is reckoned to be one of the best-selling books in the world.

So it almost seems unfair that, in addition to his runaway literary success, Archer also lived a life as full of drama and incident as, well, a Jeffrey Archer novel. He was a politician who rubbed elbows with Margaret Thatcher before his career crashed out. He got swindled out of a million dollars by a fraudster before he turned 35. He spent two years in prison for perjury – in a case that revolved around his transaction with a sex worker. He amassed an impressive collection of political cartoons. He managed to be such a wit and a charmer – hosting dinners, giving speeches – that other writers would glance at each other and whisper “Doesn’t he know we’re supposed to be introverts?”

No wonder Archer’s novels – more than 40 in all, including his last and latest, Adam and Eve, published the day after he died and, in his opinion, his best – were equally ingratiating, bidding assertively for the reader’s attention and goodwill. They were also driven by themes like greed and ambition, much like the people who surrounded Archer in his other walks of life. And no wonder — even though Archer was never a critics’ darling — readers responded to the books so enthusiastically, as to someone who knows what he’s writing about, and knows how to make it enormously entertaining besides.