Jeffrey Archer, the ‘Prodigal Liar’ is Dead: For a Certain Generation of Indian Readers His Novels Were a Rite of Passage

Jeffrey Archer died at home this week at 86, on the eve of publishing one more novel. Even his exit came with a plot twist. By morning the tributes were rolling in, and most of them read like his dust jackets: master storyteller, born survivor, the ultimate comeback kid, a lovable rogue who always livened up a studio.

I have a shelf of his paperbacks in my basement library, a couple of them bought twice by accident. I’m not going to pretend he couldn’t spin a yarn. He wrote stories that were riveting. Especially, for an adolescent impressionable mind like mine when I devoured most of his novels. But between the obituary desks and the breakfast shows, a convicted perjurer has been rebranded as a rascal, and that rebranding deserves a harder look than it’s getting.

For a certain generation of Indian readers, Archer wasn’t just a bestseller. He was a rite of passage. If you grew up in the eighties and nineties, his name was on every railway bookstall, in every circulating library, and in a stack of pirated paperbacks at the traffic signal, priced to the rupee. “Kane and Abel” passed from hand to hand in hostel rooms until the spine gave out. He (along with a few more) was the writer you read after Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys, and Alistair MacLean and before you decided you were too serious for him. India returned the affection: it became one of his biggest markets, and he kept coming back to sign books and talk cricket.

What most of us didn’t get, sitting in Tamil Nadu, Pilani, or Pune with a dog-eared “Prodigal Daughter,” was the rest of the story. The Coghlan affair played out in British tabloids we never saw, and by the time news of his conviction reached us, it was a small item on an inside page. We knew the storyteller. We never really met the man.

Start with the small lies, because with Archer the small lies were never really small. They were rehearsals. He let people believe he had been to Wellington College; he had grown up near a village called Wellington. He presented himself as an Oxford man; he had done a one-year teaching diploma in the city and been allowed to use a college gym. A-levels appeared on his record that he never sat. Each embellishment was harmless on its own. Together they describe a man who treated his own biography as a first draft.

Then the money. In 1974 he left the House of Commons on the edge of bankruptcy after sinking his savings into a Canadian investment swindle. He wrote his way out, which is the part everyone loves to retell. Less often retold: the 1994 Anglia Television share deal, when he bought shares for a friend shortly before a takeover was announced while his wife sat on Anglia’s board. He was investigated and never charged. 

In 1986, while Archer was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, a tabloid sting caught an associate of his handing Coghlan £2,000 in an envelope at a London railway station. The money was meant to send her abroad and keep her quiet.

Or the 1991 Simple Truth campaign for Kurdish refugees, whose headline total of £57 million turned out to lean heavily on government pledges that would likely have been made anyway. Each time there was a cloud, and each time he walked out from under it.

The episode that should define him, though, involves a woman most of his readers never heard of: Monica Coghlan.

In 1986, while Archer was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, a tabloid sting caught an associate of his handing Coghlan £2,000 in an envelope at a London railway station. The money was meant to send her abroad and keep her quiet. Archer resigned his party post but insisted he had never met her. When the Daily Star reported that he had slept with her, he sued.

The 1987 libel trial is one of the uglier episodes in modern British justice. Coghlan, a working-class single mother from the North, was taken apart in the witness box over many hours and broke down repeatedly. The judge, Mr. Justice Caulfield, all but swooned over Mary Archer, inviting the jury to consider whether a man with such a “fragrant” wife would need what Coghlan was offering. The jury took the hint. Archer walked away with £500,000, then a record, and Coghlan walked away branded a liar in front of the whole country.

She wasn’t the liar. In 1999 Ted Francis, the friend who had supplied Archer’s alibi for the night in question, admitted it had been false. Archer’s former secretary had kept the genuine diary for that period; the one produced in court had been fabricated. In 2001 Archer was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years. He served about half.

Coghlan never saw any of it. She was killed in a car crash in April 2001, weeks before the trial opened. Some commentators this week have hinted at something darker. There is no evidence for that, and her story doesn’t need the embellishment. The truth is grim enough: a woman told the truth, was publicly humiliated for it by a rich man and a smitten judge, carried that for fourteen years, and died before the record was corrected.

So how did he keep getting away with it? Partly because the people with power to stop him chose not to. Margaret Thatcher made him deputy chairman despite warnings about his reliability. John Major sent him to the House of Lords in 1992, five years after the libel trial, when doubts about it were already circulating in Westminster. William Hague backed him as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London in 1999, and he had to withdraw only when Francis went to the papers. Three successive leaders looked at the same man and saw a fundraiser, an entertainer, a useful turn at the party conference. None of them saw what was plainly in front of them.

And when he came out of prison, he went straight back to the Lords. The rules of the time had no way to remove him. He kept his title, his seat, and his place on the red benches until the end.

The media did the rest. The biographer and broadcaster Michael Crick has spent decades pointing out that Archer was treated on air as an amiable rogue rather than a criminal. Chat show hosts loved him. He was quick, funny, self-deprecating in a way that cost him nothing, and always good for a story. Crick notes that no broadcaster ever pressed Archer on his brief police career and why it ended, even as he wrote a whole series of novels about a London detective. Interviewers asked about his comebacks. Almost nobody asked about the woman he had flattened on his way to the first one.

This week’s coverage grates for the same reason. Archer’s charm was real, and so was his talent for plot. His books sold in the hundreds of millions, and people who never read anything else read him. That’s worth acknowledging. But a talent for storytelling is not a license to rewrite the record, and an obituary that calls him a lovable rogue is doing exactly what he did in that courtroom in 1987: choosing the more flattering version because it reads better.

There is a photograph of Monica Coghlan, taken on a London street, holding up the program for “Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” Archer’s West End play about a man on trial. She is looking straight at the camera with a small, knowing smile, the look of someone who knew exactly how that story really ended.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” —    Politics,   Movies, Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.