Leaving aside a colourful personal life that reads like a trashy novelette or an improbable adventure story, when it came to Archer's own literary efforts, there were so many unanswered questions.ĭid he write the books himself? How many "editors" and ghosts were involved? Did his thrillers really sell as well as his publisher (in those days, HarperCollins) claimed? And finally, most troubling of all: how could any sentient being willingly plough through Archer's dreadful prose? When Mrs Thatcher nominated his fiction as her favourite reading, was it a rare example of that even rarer thing – a Thatcherite joke? Surely the prime minister could not be serious: had she, or her advisers, ever tried actually to read – in the sense of turning one page after another – an Archer novel? To open one of his books was to risk being assaulted by a hectic claque of cliche, mixed metaphor, implausibility, solecism and sheer, unadulterated stodginess sufficient to send most readers screaming in breathless delirium to the mature, lucid and urgent pages of Barbara Cartland or Enid Blyton.īut now, after his detention at Her Majesty's Pleasure, there is an even bigger Archer conundrum to grapple with. Long before he was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury in 2001, the Jeffrey Archer phenomenon was a puzzle to those of us in the book world who thought we had seen it all.
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