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.<\/p>\n
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Margaret Thatcher gives Jeffrey Archer a donation to a charity for Kurdish refugees in 1991. Photograph: Rebecca Naden\/PA Wire <\/p>\n
He once said 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. \u201cI was so low I would have sold fake Gucci bags on street corners,\u201d he told the Chicago Tribune. \u201cOnce you\u2019ve lost a million dollars, you may as well have lost a hundred million dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
A former public relations man, he turned to writing thrillers and found he had an immediate skill for quick action that connected with readers. \u201cWhere I come from in the west country, we say \u2018Tell \u2019em a yarn, m\u2019dear, and make \u2019em keep turning the pages, and you won\u2019t be far wrong,\u2019\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cStorytellers are very rare, but they create a lot of envy,\u201d Archer said in an interview with fellow author Anthony Horowitz for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine in 2011. \u201cThe people who survive are storytellers.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Jeffrey Archer. Photograph: Philip Brown\/Getty Images <\/p>\n
The interview evoked some of the ambiguities and passions surrounding Archer\u2019s work, which drew on themes such as power, rivalry, ambition and greed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m painfully aware that of the two writers in the room only one has an original Monet on the wall,\u201d Horowitz wrote, referring to the location of the interview in his subject\u2019s apartment. He noted that Archer\u2019s 1979 novel Kane and Abel, which sold more than 50 million copies since its publication in 1979, helped fund his art collection.<\/p>\n
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Jeffrey Archer. Photograph: Bryan O\u2019Brien\/The Irish Times <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think Jeffrey is deliberately trying to trash me,\u201d Horowitz wrote, \u201cbut he does seem to have a strange reflex action that manifests itself as one-upmanship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kane and Abel kindled one of Archer\u2019s recurrent storylines \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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 US market.<\/p>\n
According to an unauthorised 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, \u201cIf I was born today and wanted to go into politics, I would want to be born in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 United States, for instance, he told The Daily Telegraph he believed Donald Trump<\/a> would win because \u201cthree-quarters of Americans are not intelligent\u201d.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in London on April 15th, 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 \u201cpenniless\u201d.<\/p>\n Archer gave conflicting accounts of his father, William, whom he sometimes called a \u201cprinter\u201d, although by some accounts he was a bigamist and fraudster. Either way, he was not much of a presence in his son\u2019s life and died when Jeffrey was 11.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At Oxford, he showed a flair for athletics as a sprinter and hurdler \u2013 running for the university and for his country \u2013 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 \u201ca nice enough fella, but he\u2019s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it\u201d. He went on later to raise funds for Iraqi Kurds.<\/p>\n [\u00a0\u2018Tony O\u2019Reilly should have been president of Ireland\u2019: Jeffrey Archer on life, books and his God-given giftOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While a parliamentarian, he was defrauded of a major investment in a Canadian company called Aquablast and emerged with debts of some \u00a3500,000, worth millions in buying power at current exchange rates. He stepped down from parliament rather than contest the national elections in 1974.<\/p>\n \u201cI had begun to believe that everything I did was bound to be a success,\u201d he later told The Times of London. \u201cThe downfall showed me that I wasn\u2019t a god. I was a normal mortal, well able to make a bloody fool of myself, which I did.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1985, he became deputy chair 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 theatre.<\/p>\n 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 the 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.<\/p>\n
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Jeffrey Archer with then UK prime minister John Major. Photograph: Steffan Rousseau\/PA <\/p>\n