HIS WRITING CAREER

●●● Lord Jeffrey Archer wrote his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in the autumn of 1974, as a means of avoiding bankruptcy. The book was picked up by the literary agent Deborah Owen and published first in the U.S., then eventually in Britain in the autumn of 1976. A radio adaptation was aired on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1980s and a BBC Television adaptation of the book was broadcast in 1990.

●●● Kane and Abel (1979) proved to be his best-selling work, reaching number one on The New York Times bestsellers list. Like most of his early work, it was edited by Richard Cohen, the Olympic fencing gold-medallist. It was made into a television mini-series by CBS in 1985, starring Peter Strauss and Sam Neill. The following year, Granada TV screened a 10-part adaptation of another Lord Archer bestseller, First Among Equals, which told the story of four men and their quest to become prime minister. In the U.S. edition of the novel, the character of Andrew Fraser was eliminated, reducing the number of protagonists to three.

●●● As well as novels and short stories, Lord Archer has also written three stage plays. The first, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, opened in 1987 and ran at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End for over a year. Archer’s next play, Exclusive, opened at the Strand Theatre, London, in September 1989. It was not well received by critics, and closed after a few weeks. His final play, The Accused, opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor on 26 September 2000, before transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the West End in December.

●●● Lord Archer has said that he spends considerable time writing and re-writing each book. He goes abroad to write the first draft, working in blocks of two hours at a time, then writes anything up to 17 drafts in total. Since 2010, Archer has written the first draft of each new book at his villa in Mallorca, called “Writer’s Block”.

●●● In 2011, Jeffrey published the first of seven books in The Clifton Chronicles series, which follow the life of Harry Clifton from his birth in 1920, through to his funeral in 1993. The first novel in the series, Only Time Will Tell, tells the story of Harry from 1920 through to 1940, and was published in the UK on 12 May 2011. The seventh and final novel in the series, This Was a Man, was published on 3 November 2016.

●●●The Short, the Long and the Tall, an illustrated collection of Lord Jeffrey Archer’s short stories, was published in November 2020, with watercolor illustrations by artist Paul Cox.

●●● Over My Dead Body was published in October 2021, and is the fourth book in a series of thrillers featuring detective William Warwick. The book was critically acclaimed and became a New

York Times bestseller.