THE NEW YORK TIMES: Novelist, politician, jailbird: Jeffrey Archer’s real life rivalled best-selling thrillers

Jeffrey Archer, a bestselling 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 Monday at his home in London.

He was 86.

His publisher, HarperCollins, announced his death in a statement. His final novel, Adam and Eve, about the intertwined destinies of the highborn and the humble, was scheduled for publication 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 parties at which celebrity guests were served top-end Krug Champagne and lowly shepherd’s pie.

He also maintained homes in Mallorca and in the village of Grantchester outside Cambridge, England, where he bought the 17th century Old Vicarage, once the home of poet Rupert Brooke. 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 southwest 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 stood 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.”

A former public relations man, he turned to writing thrillers and found he had an immediate skill for quick action that connected with readers. “Where I come from in the West Country, we say ‘Tell ’em a yarn, m’dear, and make ’em keep turning the pages, and you won’t be far wrong,’” he explained.

His first published novel told the story of four men who banded together to defraud a con man who had robbed them of $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,” Archer said in an interview with fellow author Anthony Horowitz for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine in 2011. “The people who survive are storytellers.”

The interview evoked some of the ambiguities and passions surrounding Archer’s work, which drew on themes such as power, rivalry, ambition and greed.

“I’m painfully aware that of the two writers in the room only one has an original Monet on the wall,” Horowitz wrote, referring to the location of the interview in his subject’s apartment. He noted that Archer’s 1979 novel Kane and Abel, which sold more than 50 million copies since its publication in 1979, helped fund his art collection.

“I don’t think Jeffrey is deliberately trying to trash me,” Horowitz wrote, “but he does seem to have a strange reflex action that manifests itself as one-upmanship.”

Kane and Abel kindled one of Archer’s recurrent storylines — the rags-to-riches struggle of Abel Rosnovski, born in penury in a forest in Poland, who becomes a wealthy hotelier in the United States and arch rival to William Kane, born on the same day but thousands of miles away as the scion of a wealthy banking family in New York.

Archer paid attention to sales of his books in the US and rewrite some of them specifically for the US market.

According to an unauthorized Archer biography, Stranger Than Fiction (1995), by British journalist Michael Crick, he felt a greater affinity for the showbiz aspects of American public life and once said, “If I was born today and wanted to go into politics, I would want to be born in the United States.”

In later years, though, he vouchsafed a less-flattering view of Americans in remarks that recalled his reputation for gaffes and blunt talking. During the presidential election campaign in 2024 in the US, for instance, he said he believed Donald Trump would win because “three-quarters of Americans are not intelligent.”

Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in London on April 15, 1940, and grew up in Weston-super-Mare. His mother was Lola (Cook) Archer, a journalist with a column in a local newspaper and whom he described as largely “penniless.”

Archer gave conflicting accounts of his father, William, whom he sometimes called a “printer,” although by some accounts he was a bigamist and fraudster.

Either way, he was not much of a presence in his son’s life and He died when Jeffrey was 11.

Archer was educated on a scholarship to 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 southeast and went on in 1963 to study for a diploma in education at the University of Oxford, where he was associated with Brasenose College.

At Oxford, he showed a flair for athletics as a sprinter and hurdler — running for the university and for his country — and for philanthropy, fundraising on behalf of the non-profit Oxfam. A photograph from the era showed him with the Beatles, whose members he had persuaded to endorse a campaign by visiting Brasenose College.

The drummer, Ringo Starr, was widely quoted as describing him as “a nice enough fella, but he’s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it.”

He went on later to raise funds for Iraqi Kurds.

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-violume 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 southwest England, and the equally ambitious series of books such as An Eye for an Eye (2024) following the career of a Scotland Yard detective. 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 sued the tabloid Daily Star for libel for reporting that he had slept with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. The judge, Bernard Caulfield, described Archer’s wife Mary as having “elegance” and “fragrance” and asked whether the writer would have needed “cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel room.”

Archer won the case and was awarded €500,000 in damages.

In 1992, with the support of Conservative backers including Thatcher and 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 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.