British author Jeffrey Archer dies at 86

• Bestselling British author Jeffrey Archer passed away on October 6. He was 86.

• Archer sold over 300 million copies worldwide and was known for pacy thrillers like his 1976 debut ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’ and 1979’s ‘Kane & Abel’. 

• His final novel, ‘Adam and Eve’, is due to be published in October.

• Archer was born in North London on April 15, 1940.

• His debut novel was said to have been inspired by his own experience nearly going bankrupt.

• He went on to spend 14 years and five months on Britain’s Sunday Times bestseller lists and over five years on The New York Times bestseller lists.

• Archer climbed the ranks of Britain’s Conservative Party under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and was appointed in 1992 to the House of Lords by her successor, Prime Minister John Major.

• While running for mayor of London in 1999, allegations emerged that Archer had lied in court during a libel case more than a decade earlier. 

• He had sued a newspaper that accused him of paying a sex worker and won £500,000 in damages. 

• The case returned to the public eye when he was selected as the Conservative candidate to become London’s first elected mayor in 1999. 

• A former friend accused him of lying and Archer was eventually charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice, convicted and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. 

• Archer was cast out of his political party just before he was jailed on perjury charges in 2001.

• Archer was released early in 2003 after serving just over two years in prison. 

• He returned to the House of Lords, politically non-affiliated, until his retirement in 2024.

• Archer chronicled his time behind bars in a three-volume series titled ‘A Prison Diary’. The memoirs — ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Heaven’ — shared rare insight into the lives of inmates in British prisons, from the high-security HMP Belmarsh to the North Sea Camp open prison.