journalism

400 million readers love him. His fellow authors don't. Will Anthony Horowitz fall for the master page-turner's charms?

This is almost certainly a mistake. I’m in the middle of my own book tour (the last Alex Rider) when I get an email from The Sunday Telegraph.Would I like to interview Jeffrey Archer who is himself promoting Jeffrey Archer's cartoon collection to go on public display.

I am determined to be non-judgmental. This is a writer meeting a writer to talk about writing. But actually it’s figures not words that dominate our conversation. Kane and Abel sold 50 million copies – and that’s a conservative estimate apparently. Three thousand people came to hear him speak when he toured India the week before I met him.

His first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, has now sold 27,750,000 copies. Note that number. We’re talking millions but he still remembers the hundreds of thousands. I ask him how he can be so sure and a moment later his assistant responds to his call with the printed evidence. “Actually, it’s nearer 30 million,” he confides to me. “I just prefer to go under.”

And we’re only 10 minutes in. I’m trying to steer the conversation towards writing techniques, towards inspiration and the existential angst of being a writer. I don’t think Jeffrey does existential.

More to the point, I’m painfully aware that of the two writers in the room, only one has an original Monet on the wall. “Kane and Abel!” he explains, pointing to it with a laugh. Just the one book, then. I don’t think Jeffrey is deliberately trying to trash me, but he does seem to have a strange reflex action that manifests itself as one-upmanship.

I mention that I’ve enjoyed the daily tours at the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York. Well, he has a famous academic who takes him around the world’s greatest galleries once a week. I tell him I walked the two miles to his home. Cue an anecdote about his running the London marathon. It really matters to him that he sells tons more than other famous writers he names, although he doesn’t want to offend them so asks me not to.

None of this is boasting, not exactly. Here’s the strange thing, or perhaps, not so strange, given those past crimes and misdemeanours.

Jeffrey seems to have an impulse to prove everything he says. He tells me that for six weeks he’s been the bestselling author in India. His assistant immediately pops down a second time with a printout of the Indian chart. And yes, there he is, well ahead of Mirza Waheed and Manju Kapur.

Here’s photographic evidence of him addressing the crowd of 3,000.

The Washington Post described him as, “a storyteller in the class of Dumas”. You don’t believe me? Well, here it is in black and white.

You have to understand that I’m perched on this sofa, which is expensive and massively upholstered and puffed out with cushions and it’s a bit like my interview with Jeffrey, in that I’m both uncomfortable and afraid I’m about to fall off the edge.

Is he a nice man?

I’m enjoying the slightly unreal experience of meeting him but all the time I worry that one wrong word, one inept question and he’ll throw me out of the window, not the door. I make a mild remark about his working eight hours a day (in four two-hour sessions), using the same Staedler pencils and notebooks.

He’s already admitted that writing was his second choice of career after politics and it occurs to me that he views it in some ways as a business. “What a vulgar suggestion!” he exclaims and there is a sort of a smile on his lips that balances the anger in his eyes, but actually it’s a close-run thing.

And I haven’t even talked about his book!

OK. Only Time Will Tell is a family saga that the publishers compare to Galsworthy but which I would say is closer to R F Delderfield, a writer of light, between-the-war fiction whose work, incidentally, I like very much. It starts in 1919 and focuses on one Harry Clifton, a boy destined for great things despite having a mother who works as a waitress (based on his own mother, Jeffrey says) and a father who has died, in mysterious circumstances, during the First World War. Harry’s life is manipulated by a number of upper and lower-class characters who either believe in him or seek to destroy him.

Now, here’s the honest truth. I began reading the book with a certain amount of disbelief. I found the period details unconvincing.

Archer’s technique seems to be to throw as many historical ephemera at the page as possible in the hope that at least some of them will stick. So, in short succession, we have threepenny bits, Ronald Colman, coffin nails (cigarettes), Fry’s Five Boys chocolate (twice), cloth caps and lard sandwiches. And yet there is no authentic sense of period. The dialogue is often questionable. “Did you have a good hols, old chap?” “Topping!” From the title onwards, there is a reliance on clichés so, for example, as soon as you learn that Harry is a brilliant singer you know that at some stage someone will say that he has the voice of an angel and, sure enough, the author doesn’t disappoint.

And yet. And yet. I was reading the book on tour and found I was bunking off from my own signing sessions to get back to the story. Sitting in a Starbucks in Oxford, feverishly thumbing the pages to find out what dire machinations Hugo Barrington (a villain straight out of Victorian melodrama) would come up with next, I had to admit I was utterly hooked. It was an absurdly enjoyable read. My margin notes fell away. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter how well or not the book was written. Look again at those sales figures – 330 million! You don’t reach that pinnacle by marketing or self-promotion. You have to be pretty good at what you do and, like it or not, Archer is one of the best.

I mention to him how much I enjoyed the book (leaving out the negative bits) and he’s genuinely delighted. Despite the reputation, the mannerisms, the bombast, it’s as if there’s a very modest and pleasant human trying to get my attention. I ask him if he flies in private planes, a suggestion he dismisses contemptuously but adds that he does pay for speedy boarding on easyJet, which I find strangely endearing. We are interrupted several times by telephone calls and he apologises courteously.

It turns out that he is organising a major celebrity auction at Christie’s for charity and although he seems to enjoy charity as much for the buzz and the excitement it provides him as the benefit it brings others, he personally raised £2.4 million last year and remains impressively active. He talks about a murderer at Belmarsh whom he has supported to a BA in English literature. He has five fellowships in place at Oxbridge, helping underprivileged students.

Most of the “writing” questions that I’ve prepared simply shrivel and die in the asking. For what it’s worth, Archer does not structure his books, he says, and looks at me disdainfully when I tell him that I do. Without wishing to give anything away, a huge moral and psychological question hangs over the final chapters of Only Time Will Tell, but according to Archer (he got his assistant to verify this) he only worked out the answer the day before my visit, shortly after the second volume was completed. I’m a writer and I’m telling you that’s not possible.

“A storyteller shouldn’t know what’s on the next page,” he tells me and I’m tempted to reply “B------!” but then I glance once again at that Monet.

Going through my notes and my recording, there is one theme, one assertion that forms the cornerstone of my three hours with Jeffrey Archer – and that’s his self-confidence as a storyteller. Although he writes up to 14 drafts of his books, the story is the one thing that never changes.

When I suggest that some of his action sequences are a touch underwritten and peremptory – I’m thinking in particular of a wartime attack on a cargo ship towards the end of OTWT – he is scornfully dismissive. Why should he waste time and energy on description when it gets in the way of the story? “Storytellers are very rare,” he says, “but they create a lot of envy.” This is not just something he believes himself. He was told it by a famous Cambridge professor and he dares me to disagree. “The people who survive are storytellers.”

This is a dominant theme. By his own admission, Archer has everything he could possibly want in life. A vast fortune. International recognition. A wife about whom he speaks with reverence and a close-knit family. Homes in London, Grantchester and Majorca. So what drives him now?

His love of story. To what does he owe his success? His mastery of story.

Towards the end of our conversation he makes a telling comparison. Patrick White and Nadine Gordimer (both Nobel Prize winners) have been virtually forgotten, he says, with just a hint of glee. But, you see, they knew nothing about story. On the other hand, Agatha Christie…

And suddenly I see what should have been obvious from the start. Nobody praised Christie for the beauty of her language, the depth of her characters, the veracity of her settings. And yet she endures. Thirty-five years after her death she is still the queen of crime.

You can be snobbish and dismissive of Archer’s work but he provides exactly the same measure of satisfaction to as many people with perhaps even more success and far fewer deaths. So when he tells me, with absolute certainty, that he will be remembered and read long after he has gone, I’m inclined to agree.

We met on a Thursday. On the Friday I go back to have my photograph taken with him and he seems thrilled to see me. I have talent and energy, he tells me. I will go far. Well, that’s before he reads this. In the next hour, he pounds my chest, sorts out my insurance, fixes me up with a new agent (the old one may not be too happy), recommends two books I’ll love and gives me a tour of his apartment. There’s a copy of Molesworth: How to be Topp in the loo. It sort of says it all.

And I come away with a genuine liking and even a sort of respect for the man despite everything I’ve read in the press. Which only goes to show what I knew all along. Coming here was definitely a mistake.