Sidharth Pansari of Crossword (left) hands over Jeffrey Archer to Jeffrey Archer — a caricature by Debasish Deb of The Telegraph Pictures by Rashbehari Das and Aranya Sen

So what does Lord Jeffrey Archer want? Another 100 million readers! “Roald Dahl told me, you are my successor,” the master storyteller told an audience entranced at Salon 175 of The Bengal Club on Thursday evening. Here’s over to the master of words...

I have been told that in this particular audience there are people who are interested in theatre and in arts as well as books. So I want to place my own cards on the table and say that I am a great lover of theatre. In London, I go to the theatre twice a week. I actually think that we have the best theatre in the world and it will be foolish to live in London and not go to the theatre twice a week. Last week, just before I came here, I went and watched The Twelfth Night a 17th time. So, you see, I am a nutcase when it comes to theatre. I also love art galleries. I live in art galleries. My wife and I are going next year to Sienna and Naples to the new art galleries there.

Writing came to me almost by mistake. I left the House of Commons at the age of 34 and sat down to write Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. There are many myths about me and one of the myths I read about myself is that it was an instant bestseller. Rubbish! They published 3,000 copies only and that was after it had been turned down by 14 other publishers. It’s now sold 27,750,000 copies! And if any of you go around telling anyone that you read the first edition, only 140 copies came to India!

The real breakthrough was Kane and Abel. India went mad about Kane and Abel. Sheer nutcases, all of you. I can’t go to a gathering like this in this country where 90 per cent of the people in the room including the doorman, the person who drove me here, the person who is serving, have read Kane and Abel. Fifty million Indians have read Kane and Abel. And it is rewriting Kane and Abel that inspired me to write Only Time Will Tell, which is the first part of the five-part Clifton Chronicles. These five books will cover the 100 years from 1920 to 2020 and I want to make it the best thing I have ever done. For Kane and Abel, though, the story remained the same, only the craftsmanship has got better. I added 27,000 words and yet it is 7,000 words shorter than the original. So you can imagine the kind of work I have put in it.

I am an expert on cricket. I know all of you want to know who would play whom in the final of the World Cup and I can tell you that it will be England vs Ireland! There isn’t any doubt in my mind that India is the best cricket team in the world but — and it’s a big but — I want you to go home tonight and think when was the last time you saw an Indian batsman run three runs and not be run out. It’s the laziest team I have ever seen! They should all watch A.B. de Villiers carefully because he takes a lot of twos and threes.... You also haven’t got many bowlers there.

I think Twenty20 is rubbish! One Day cricket is just about bearable. Test match is what matters. And Test match is about V.V.S. Laxman and Rahul Dravid batting all day and keeping the Australians at bay. By the way, any team which leaves out (Sourav) Ganguly and Dravid doesn’t bloody well deserve to win!

The best questions on this India tour have come from a 12-year-old girl. The next generation is going to be run by women. I have met a lot of them here. They are all of 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. But they know everything. One of them came up to me and said, When is your next book coming out? I asked her, Have you actually read Only Time Will Tell? Yes, she said. Aaah... I said, but I have written 16 other novels. And she said, I’ve read every one of them. So the future is, unquestionably, with women. You men can sit back and you will be sent to the wilderness.

I can’t play the violin. I can’t ballet dance. I can’t sing a song. I can tell a story but I can’t tell you how I do it. It’s a god-gifted talent. But I do work very hard in my beautiful home in London or my home in Cambridge. I am a slave, I am a workaholic. Because I have always believed that energy plus talent and you are a king, talent and no energy and you are a pauper and energy and no talent and you can still be a prince.

I had the privilege of being edited by the great Corlies Smith, who edited JD Salinger. And he told me that if you get yourself into a hole, actually make it twice as difficult. The reader becomes far more passionate as to how you will get out and if you see an easy way out, the reader will also see an easy way out. He taught me that. At the end of Only Time Will Tell, I made it almost impossible for me to get out and it took me nine months to get out. When I first wrote Kane and Abel, I wrote a 120 pages of Kane and then a 120 pages of Abel and then they met. Corlies rang me up from the United States and he told me that he wanted a big change before we met. He said, I want three pages of Abel, three pages of Kane, six pages of Abel, six pages of Kane, 12 pages of Abel, 12 pages of Kane, 20 pages of Abel, 20 pages of Kane and then they meet. Because at the moment you get so excited about Abel, you don’t want to meet Kane and when you read the Kane portion, you get so excited about Kane, you don’t want to meet Abel. Everything was there in those 240 pages. But it was his genius as an editor that he spotted what needed to be done. And that great man once summed up the difference between a writer and an editor — the first draft. Very cruel line!

In a short story you have to know the last line because there’s always a twist in all my short stories. And that’s only 20 pages. In a novel, I vaguely know where I am going from a third of the novel.

I love storytellers. I have to tell you that I have not gone beyond page 17 of Ulysses. Come on, how many of you have read Patrick White? Two, three, four of you? How many of you have read RK Narayan? All of you. I love Narayan. I love Francis Scott Fitzgerald. What a miracle command over the language. I love Charles Dickens… his minor characters were more important than the major characters. I love (Alexandre) Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. I love 39 Steps. I want a beginning, middle and end. I want to turn the page.

I don’t want the Nobel Prize. What I want is another 100 million readers. Roald Dahl told me, you are my successor.... Now they are giving me awards in France and Germany. But I was always referred to as the cheap storyteller, the airport novelist. I had to live with that.

Do you agree with Jeffrey Archer that the next generation will be run by women? Tell t2@abp.in