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

In a life of achievement and disgrace, he wrote best-selling novels with themes he knew intimately: ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal

By Alan Cowell 

 

Jeffrey Archer, a best-selling British author, politician, philanthropist, athlete and one-time jailbird whose résumé seesawed between achievement and disgrace, and who inspired abiding public fascination with headline-grabbing accounts, both fictional and personal, of ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal, died on 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 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 Monet and 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 the 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 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.”

 

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 both unusual and the object of resentment.

 

“Storytellers are very rare, but they create a lot of envy,” Archer said in an interview with a 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 & Abel,” which has sold more than 50 million copies since its publication, 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 & Abel” kindled one of Archer’s recurrent story lines — the rags-to-riches struggle. In this case, the two main characters were Abel Rosnovski, born in penury in a forest in Poland, who becomes a wealthy hotelier in the United States and an archrival 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 particular attention to sales of his books in the United States and went so far as to rewrite some of them specifically for the American market.

 

According to an unauthorized Archer biography, “Stranger Than Fiction” (1995), by the 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 2024 presidential election campaign in the United States, for instance, he told The Daily Telegraph 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; he described her as largely “penniless.”

 

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 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 a hurdler — running both for the university and for his country — and for philanthropy, fund-raising on behalf of the nonprofit organization 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.” Archer went into public relations and fund-raising, 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.

 

Archer began a political career as a Conservative Party member of the Greater London Council from 1967 to 1970. He became one of the youngest lawmakers in the House of Commons in 1969, at age 29, winning a special election for the district of Louth in eastern England.

 

While a member of Parliament, he was defrauded of a major investment in a Canadian company called Aquablast and emerged with debts of about 500,000 pounds, worth millions in buying power at current exchange rates. He stepped down from Parliament rather than contest the national elections in 1974.

 

“I had begun to believe that everything I did was bound to be a success,” he later told The Times of London. “The downfall showed me that I wasn’t a god. I was a normal mortal, well able to make a bloody fool of myself, which I did.”

 

In 1985, he became deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, a high-profile, unelected position. Between the 1980s and the early 2000s he wrote three stage plays that received uneven notices. Such was his fascination with the stage that, in 1988, he bought a controlling share in a London theater.

 

In his books, Archer showed a liking for multivolume 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 an equally ambitious series of books, such as “An Eye for an Eye” (2024), following the career of a Scotland Yard detective named William Warwick. Even in nonfiction, 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. 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 former Prime Minister Margaret 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 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.