4 min readOct 6, 2026 04:59 PM IST First published on: Oct 6, 2026 at 04:59 PM ISTBefore Hollywood came to our neighbourhoods, before Santa Barbara flummoxed our crammed living rooms, there was Jeffrey Archer. Accessible and dependable, churning out thrillers in book after book, putting us right there next to people in positions of power beyond our budding teenage comprehension. White House to Westminster, FBI to Mossad, within our reach, occupying pride of place on the mats of enthusiastic sellers of pirated books in Connaught Place’s colonnaded, post-imperialist corridors (an irony to please any writer’s heart); held aloft by indefatigable hawkers at traffic lights; or jostling for space with Manohar Kahaniyan and Reader’s Digest at railway platform bookstalls.Pop-up libraries, functioning from crummy, dimly lit garages in DDA colonies, stocked them, friends swapped them, and us of the ’80s generation got a new vocabulary that didn’t seem handed or drummed down, even as parents beamed in approval at “our love for reading English”.AdvertisementThis was unlike other parent-approved reading material – a big bulk of it Soviet-discounted literature – that one way or the other turned out to be a lesson in abstinence or discipline or “being better”.Archer’s characters had ambition, greed, villainy, rivalries, deviousness, and love for the good life, with his stories often ending on a satisfying twist. His women could be politicians and, yes, even the US President, run corporations and rock families, with Archer attributing it to the strong women in his own life. One of them was late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who was behind Archer’s own short-lived political career.Also Read | The cartoon, a mirror and the MahatmaIt worked, earning Archer 14 years and five months on Britain’s Sunday Times bestseller lists, over five years on The New York Times bestseller lists, and sales of 300 million books worldwide.AdvertisementWhen Archer served time for perjury, for lying in a libel case against a tabloid that said he had paid a woman for sex – years after the event – it seemed just the kind of scandal that would animate one of his novels. Unsurprisingly, wife Mary Archer, a scientist in her own right, earned herself some unforgettable lines too, with the judge remarking after her testimony: “Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance?”Archer probably would have kept it simpler, not sound as laboured as a judge in a wig. And yet for us non-native-English speakers, he was our introduction to terms such as First Among Equals, Honour Among Thieves, and a personal favourite, A Quiver Full of Arrows. It was a cosy, warm summer when we waited for that one, the “quiver” holding a promise as much in its title as how our lips and teeth met over the word. And, has there ever been a title that sounded as intimate and as ambitious as Shall We Tell The President?Archer reaffirmed his position as the author whose books we took into beds, and raced through over one night, with his professed love for India. He often came to the country, had friends here, and released books in India before they premiered abroad.you may likeOne reason for this was to beat the book pirates. But would he have minded the boy hawker peddling “the latest Jeffrey Archer”, while balancing countless other knockoffs, tapping on his car window at a traffic light?It would be a twist he would enjoy. As much as the fact that death came to him a day before the release of what would be his final book. Its title? Adam & Eve.The writer is editor (planning and projects), The Indian Express. shalini.langer@expressindia.com