Source : the age
Best-selling British novelist and former Tory politician Jeffrey Archer, who was jailed for perjury in a high-profile libel case, has died at 86, his publisher HarperCollins said on Monday.
Archer sold over 300 million copies worldwide during his five-decade writing career and was known for pacy thrillers such as his 1976 debut Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less and the Kane and Abel series. His final novel, Adam and Eve, was set for release on Tuesday.
A prominent Conservative politician, Archer briefly served as a lawmaker before becoming a senior party official under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s.
But Archer suffered a very public downfall when he was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice in 2001. The charges came from his 1987 libel case against the British newspaper the Daily Star, in which he was awarded £500,000 ($948,000). He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
Kate Elton, HarperCollins’ UK CEO and Archer’s editor, said in a statement: “We’re all devastated to have lost a writer who has brought joy to generations of readers – and a true friend”.
Just last week Archer visited his old school library, in the village of Wellington in the English county of Somerset, the BBC reported.
“It’s wonderful to come back. What I got a real thrill about when I was walking towards the library is seeing the young boys and girls and thinking, ‘that’s the next generation’,” Archer said, according to the British broadcaster.
He said he attended the school only because of a scholarship.
“I was on a scholarship because we had no money. I came from Weston-super-Mare, and we had no money. I would never have got in without a scholarship.”
Archer was born in London in 1940, but his family soon moved to Somerset where, the BBC reports, his parents bought a house from John Cleese’s mother.
With Reuters
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Kayla Olaya is a culture reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
