Unlike politicians, art collectors or policemen, British novelists — even crime novelists — are a law-abiding lot. How many have gone down? Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel, heads the list of fiction’s malefactors. He was imprisoned in 1703 for sedition. John Cleland served time in debtors’ prison, and rewarded posterity with Fanny Hill, the onanist’s bible. Oscar Wilde got two years’ hard labour for ”unnatural practices” in 1895.
Among his other career achievements (as politician, art collector and policeman), Archer is the most famous British novelist — certainly the biggest bestselling British novelist — to have been convicted of a major felony. As a career criminal, Archer is clumsier, even, than his con man father, William. How Archer bumbled himself into the nick, with all the ”get out of jail free” cards showered on him over the past 14 years, is a bigger mystery than even Agatha Christie could have concocted.
As a novelist, Archer is somewhat better than the mocking reviewers allow. There is, of course, the question of originality. Many fingers dip into Archer’s fictional pie, from his loyal wife Mary ”translating his first novel into English” to editor Richard Cohen, who acted as midwife to the mid-career fiction. (Cohen’s mission in life, he said, was to keep the full horror of unvarnished Archer prose from the reading public). At the end of the production line is the anonymous army of ”fact checkers” who weed out Archer’s bloomers ( though a distressing number still get through) and the grandees who are ostentatiously thanked ”for their help”.
Nonetheless, the ”germ” or ”through line” of an Archer novel is usually his own (where, that is, he doesn’t lift some nifty gimmick from a fellow author; he caught on early to the legal loophole of ”no copyright in ideas”).
As a novelist, Archer took as his role model John Buchan, who wrote ”shockers” (spy thrillers), got himself made Baron Tweedsmuir (like Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare), and ended up as governor-general of Canada. Archer, famously, aimed higher: ”When I was three, I wanted to be four; when I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.” Alas, not in this lifetime.
The novelist with whom Archer most likes to align himself is F Scott Fitzgerald. It’s mystifying until you realise that Archer is thinking not of the writer but of Fitzgerald’s most famous creation. Jay Gatsby (born James Gatz) drags himself up from Midwest nowhere to pose (with dubious credentials) as an Oxford graduate. The Great Gatsby gives great partiesand worships the ”fragrant” (but unattainable) Daisy. He is disgraced and destroyed for an offence he did not commit. None of those who freeloaded at his parties stand by Gatsby at his time of trial. Archer, too, sees himself as worthier than all those Conservative Party rats who were only too glad to guzzle his shepherd’s pie before his ship began to sink.
Archer’s fiction invites being read as an allegory of the author’s life. His first published novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, is a transparently fantasised revenge on those rogues (cleverer rogues than him, damn them) who duped, bankrupted and wrecked his (first) political career in a financial scam. A standard Archer theme is rags to riches. He is addicted to fables of dizzying upward social mobility. Another Archer standby is the 100-to-one outsider making it, by sheer chutzpah, to the top of politics’ slippery pole. Such as, for example, the first woman president of the United States, Florentyna Kane, in The Prodigal Daughter. If a woman can do it, why not a young chancer from the West Country?
The corridors of power in Archer’s fictional universe invariably lead to the giddy summit — Downing Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Presidents, premiers and prime ministers figure centrally in nine of Archer’s 10 novels. He is obsessed, to the point of drooling, with high political office.
Meaningful personal themes recur in the novels. High on the list is the dishonoured father. On the evidence of his fiction, Archer is suspiciously au fait with the intricacies of sheltering money from Inland Revenue in Switzerland (in A Matter of Honour, the villain hides a corpse in a safety deposit box in Geneva — symbolic, you might think).
And running through many of the novels is the Archerian obsession with forged documents. In Honour Among Thieves, the safety of the Western world hinges on a cunning counterfeit of the American Declaration of Independence. The novel was written at a period (1993) when Archer’s alibi depended, precariously, on his secretary’s diaries remaining hidden.
But the strangest feature of Archer’s fiction is its eerily prophetic quality. His novels foretell his disasters with the doom-laden prescience of the soothsayer in Julius Caesar.
First Among Equals (his most naked ”Archer becomes prime minister” fantasy) came out just before the Monica Coghlan scandal in 1986, in which he sued a newspaper that had nailed him for consorting with Coghlan, a prostitute, and which destroyed his (second) political career. In that novel, a contender for the nation’s highest office learns that the News of the World has offered £100 000 to his tramp of a wife for his ”unexpurgated” private life. He buys her off. Barely was the novel out of the bestseller lists (boosted by a television adaptation) than the paper was, for real, entrapping the novelist into attempting to buy off Coghlan with her unexpurgated descriptions of dirty doings in Shepherd Market.
A couple of months before the destruction of his (third) political career, in 1998, Archer published his 10th novel, The Eleventh Commandment. He was, at the time, in the running to become mayor of London (the contest is slyly alluded to in the novel, with a broad hint that a certain someone will win).
The plot of The Eleventh Commandment would seem to be lifted from the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, True Lies. Connor Fitzgerald is at the end of a long career as a CIA specialist in ”wet work” — the assassination of unfriendly foreign presidents. Connor is a professional hatchet man (as was Archer, in his days of glory, as the Conservative Party’s deputy chairperson).
The gimmick in the novel, as in the film, is that his wife of 30 years, Maggie, does not know what her husband does for a living. She thinks he’s a businessman. He lives a lie — but it is a ”true lie”. The rule of the game for players such as Connor is the 11th commandment: ”Don’t get caught.”
Connor is cut loose by his superiors. Having fallen into the hands of the Russians, he is subjected to a mockery of a trial, in which he contemptuously declines to give evidence. Our hero is saved by two people: one is a loyal friend who sacrifices himself on the gallows, doing the nobler thing, Sydney Carton-style; the other is a devoted secretary. Archer should have been so lucky.
The heart of this fascinating novel is the fraught relationship of the Fitzgeralds. They are, transparently, versions of Lord and Lady Archer. Young Connor, before joining the CIA, was a humble flatfoot (young Archer was a police cadet before striking out for greater things). Maggie, by contrast, is a big brain: an academic with a doctorate in art history. As the novel opens, in 1998, she is dean of admissions at Georgetown University (where, in the 1990s, the Archers’ son William studied art history; Mary’s PhD is in chemistry).
Archer clinches the identification of Maggie and Mary with coy parallels. Dr Fitzgerald, we are told, is a devoted member of Gulp, the Georgetown University Litter Patrol. Mary Archer gives, as her recreation in Who’s Who, ”picking up litter” around Cambridge University, where she teaches. At the christening of the Fitzgeralds’ first child, someone quips ”may she be blessed with the looks of Maggie and the brains of — Maggie”. At the christening of the Archers’ first child, someone quipped: ”We must pray he has his mother’s looks — and his mother’s brains.”
During Archer’s (and her) latest trial, Mary Archer scrupulously absented herself from the proceedings, so as not to taint her evidence on the stand. On oath, she was clearly in the dark as to the full extent of her husband’s liberties with the seventh commandment and exactly what went on in his London life, something that had been spelt out to the jury in gruesome detail. This gulf of ignorance between husband and wife gives an edge to Connor Fitzgerald’s deceptions: ”How often he had wanted to tell Maggie the whole truth, and explain why he had lived a lie for so many years?”
At the end of the novel, Connor comes in from the cold. He is retired and given a new identity. ”You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” his wife says. ”I have indeed,” the husband jovially replies. ”And the rest of our lives to do it.”
That’s fiction’s happy ever after. In the real world, Archer’s explanations will have to wait until he gets out with full remission for good conduct. And will the little lady still be waiting to hear them?