An author, mightier than his works

He is among a few authors whose books have consistently hit the top of bestsellers’ list over the decades.

The inimitable Lord Jeffrey Archer, was in the City on Wednesday, at the launch of his new book, “Mightier Than The Sword,” the fifth in the Clifton Chronicles series authored by him.
The 74-year-old author is touring across five cities in India to promote his new book. After Mumbai and Pune, Archer was in Bengaluru, while, Hyderabad and Kolkata are next in his itinerary.

Fans and readers at a City bookstore, who interacted with him, were abreast of every trivial matter about Archer. At the gathering, Archer announced that the 100th edition of “Kane and Abel” would be brought out this year. The book has sold over 37 million copies. After the Clifton Chronicles, he is also planning to pen a collection of short stories, he said.

The Clifton Chronicles, supposed to be a series of five books, will now be seven. Next in the series will be a gripping story in eight chapters involving India, the author announced to the excited fans. In this, the protagonist would fall in love with an Indian girl in Mumbai, he said. “Mightier Than The Sword” saw 14 drafts, all of them handwritten and took over a thousand hours to be compiled, Archer said, and added, “If a book fails, it was because it was not good. Not because I had not tried enough.”

Prompted by a question among the audience about the frequent reference to prisons in his novels, he said when he was growing up, Alexander Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo” was his favourite novel. However, he did not want to write such a huge novel and that was when he thought of the “Prisoner of Birth.”

Archer has a large reader base in India and has been visiting the country for several years. Observing that a lot had changed in the past several years with regards to women’s freedom in the country, he complimented the Indian women for standing up for their rights.