MASTER OF MAKE-BELIEVE

50 years. after his first book, Jeffrey*Archer refuses to put down his'felt-tip Pilot pen

- ANJULY MATHAI

Jeffrey Archer is back. But then, was he ever gone? In the 50 years since writing his first book, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, Archer has kept himself busy. He has written over 40 books and sold over 300 million copies world-wide. He is published in 115 countries, in 48 languages. There is no doubt that he is a literary tour de force, but he is one who knows that he is one and seems to want to express it.

“Jeffrey seems to have an impulse to prove everything he says,” said writer Anthony Horowitz upon meeting him once. Archer tells Horowitz that he has been the bestselling author in India for six weeks, that The Washington Post described him as “a storyteller in the class of Dumas”, and that he will be remembered long after he is gone.

None of this is probably wrong, the operative word being “probably”. Archer is known for stretching the truth—an admirable quality while writing fiction, but not so much while telling facts. A Guardian reporter once recounted how Archer told him about sitting in the prime ministerial bathroom while former prime minister John Major shaved, and discussing the details of a forthcoming cabinet reshuffle, a claim that Major denied. “Somehow it didn’t really matter, though: you knew that it was possibly untrue. As a journalist you just had to lay off for the degree of likely plausibility in anything he told you,” wrote the reporter.