Jeffery Archer shows off his new bestseller

India is sold on the Indian Premier League. The television ratings have soared and the theatres are empty in the evening. But faraway in the spiritual home of the game, there’s a celebrity sceptic. Popular storyteller Jeffrey Archer is not an ardent fan of the pocketbook edition of the game. The purist streak in him calls for a Test match between India and England at Lord’s. And a century for his hero Sachin Tendulkar at the same venue.

The 68-year-old millionaire writer and disgraced politician, who was jailed for lying about being with a prostitute, is on the Landmark Jeffery Archer tour of India — his first tour of the country — to do book readings and signings for his latest thriller A Prisoner of Birth. Even as he makes a quick stopover in Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai to talk about his book, cricket quips occupy a fair share of his attention.

The British peer waxes eloquent about having dined with Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. And he squeezes into his itinerary a Twenty20 match between the Delhi DareDevils vs King’s XI Punjab at the Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi. He says he’s come to terms with the “feeling that this Indian experiment is going to be with us for a long time”.

Cricket, he confesses, is his passion. “As my friend, Farookh Engineer, says, ‘Jeffery, you would have been the natural captain of England, what a pity you can’t bat or bowl,’” laughs Archer.

There’s some truth in Engineer’s statement. Archer is a bundle of energy and it’s visible in everything he does. He’s also canny enough to know how to woo his Indian audience as he booms out to a 700-strong audience in a bookstore: “I must tell you this — when your Indian team goes abroad, they’re your best ambassadors.” He has a captive audience for the rest of the evening.

A book reading session at Landmark in Gurgaon attracted 700 fans who came to catch a glimpse of the world-famous author

Archer, who has a knack of rising phoenix-like from the ashes of disasters that would fell more ordinary mortals, is on a literary high. He’s on the bestseller lists with a book that draws on some of the convicts he met while working in the library of the high-security Belmarsh prison in southeast London. He was sentenced after being convicted of perjury at the Old Bailey in 2001 for having concealed his encounter with a prostitute.

Having already written three volumes on prison life under the title of Prison Dairies, one wonders if he’s got a deep fascination with the prison world. He replies: “You’ve got to write what you know about. Or your readers will know the difference. Anyway, the only time the critics compared me to Dostoyevsky, Pepys and Shaw was when I was writing in a cell.”

And sure enough, A Prisoner of Birth has topped fiction bestseller lists in the New York Times, The Sunday Times and The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. “While in India I’m being sold at traffic lights — apparently a measure of the success of an author here,” notes Archer. His latest title takes you into the life of a man who’s wrongly imprisoned in Belmarsh for the murder of his best friend and promises “an ending that will shock even the most ardent of his fans.”

“We’re all prisoners of birth. You and me…There were prisoners out there who couldn’t talk of a proper upbringing. My time in prison has made me realise how privileged I am,” says Archer, recalling his prison days.

He flips open a page in his book and points out an acknowledgement to a person called Billy Little. A slew of degrees and diplomas are mentioned below the name. “He got those while in prison and is studying even further. Billy Little is serving time for murder,” says the author.

A particularly dry sense of humour and a keen ability to play to the gallery comes across as he talks about a writer’s inspiration. He gives the example of Jane Austen, who wrote her novels sitting in a small village in England.

“First she wrote a story of four women trying to find husbands for themselves, next it became the story of three women, followed by that of two women and finally one woman finding a husband for herself,” he says.

They might sound like boring plots but not so, he says. “Look at how phenomenal they were. They were no murder thrillers. They didn’t even have sex. They were just about pure love. My point is that inspiration comes from around you. You’re actually surrounded by stories around you.”

Jeffrey Archer is fascinated by a Seanchai (pronounced shanakey it is Irish for ‘storyteller’). He himself turns out to be a dramatic one as he regales his readers while signing books for them. He’s making the most of the signing session at the Landmark bookstore in the outer reaches of Delhi. “In England, book signing has become unfashionable,” he grins.

The present signing session inspires the recollection of an earlier one of Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less — his first book published in 1974. “I was in a session together with authors David Nevin and James Herriot. The queue for both ran into the hundreds. I had no one. At the end, Nevin purchased a copy and told me later: ‘Long after they have stopped reading my book, they’ll be reading Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.’ That made me want to go on.”

Talks of retiring from the world of books, which he vows never to do, leads him to volunteer light-hearted details about his plans for his funeral when the time comes. “There will be shepherd’s pie and champagne,” he says. Actually every year, he hosts a Christmas party where he is famous for serving shepherd’s pie and champagne. “And there’ll be music. There’ll be Frank Sinatra and Cole Porter singing Every Time We Say Goodbye,” he smiles as he croons a couple of lines.

Archer’s has been a life that bestsellers are spun from. In the ’70s a bad investment left him bankrupt and ended his career as MP. That’s when he took up writing and paid off an overdraft of £427,727 by writing novels. He penned bestsellers like Kane & Abel that sold 27 million copies worldwide, The Prodigal Daughter and Shall We Tell The President? Also he wrote short stories like Twelve Red Herrings, A Quiver Full of Arrows, To Cut a Long Story Short.

In 1999, he stood for election to be the Mayor of London. During the campaign Archer showed the qualities that have catapulted him to fame. He campaigned tirelessly, criss-crossing his way around London meeting almost anyone and everyone. “No group was too small for him to bother with,” says one person who saw him at the time. Every day he was doing about 7-10 meetings, which given the size of London is quite extraordinary.

But his campaign ended prematurely when a scandal about his liaison with a prostitute erupted. He was found guilty of perjury and in 2001 he was sentenced to four years of which he served two. For a man who has faced ruin as a politician and businessman, Archer has learnt to bounce back time and again.

In prison he authored titles such as Cat ’ Nine Tails. He also wrote The Prison Diaries, in which he confided that he briefly contemplated suicide. Now the publication has resulted in disciplinary action against him because he identified fellow inmates in it. “It’s been damned hard work fighting back with six books in the last eight years,” says Archer, who adds he has sold a total of 135 million copies worldwide.

His power tool though has always been his pen. Sample how he puts it to use even while stringing together an introductory passage about himself in his novels: ‘The author has served five years in the House of Commons, 14 years in the House of Lords, and two in her Majesty’s prisons, which spawned three highly acclaimed Prison dairies’. “Learn to laugh at yourself,” he twinkles brightly.

Jeffery Archer with his wife Mary in London

Penning a book for this author, who started writing at the age of 34 years when he found himself out of work after a stint as an MP, is not easy even after decades of practice. “It takes a 1,000 hours and two years to pen a book. A Prisoner of Birth took 17 drafts,” he says. Also he handwrites every word with a felt-tip pen, confessing he’s unable to work on a computer.

His return from the Indian tour will see him return to his next novel, Paths of Glory, which he wants to be made into a film soon. He’ll be polishing the seventh draft of the script that is based on a real-life story and is partly set in India. He lives in London in his Thames River penthouse overlooking Parliament. But he also has a country cottage in Grantchester where he retreats for peace and quiet.

And now after having dabbled in various occupations from art gallery owner, Tory MP to a highly successful fundraiser, he realises he’s basically a writer. On the side, though, “I invest in art and theatre. I’m also doing my bit of public service and charity auctions. And he has made one promise to his fans he vows to never break.

“An agency in the States made me the offer of publishing four books a year with them. All I needed to do was give them a three-page outline for each. The rest of the novels would be ghostwritten and they would pay me $2 million per book. You might as well imagine where I told them to go. When I go to the grave, I want to go knowing you’ll be reading the books I wrote.”