Jeffrey Archer's Reading List

"Well, I’ve never written a thriller. Oh, no, I have. One. One thriller. Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less is a caper, Kane and Abe l is a saga. I change all the time. I’m lucky. Well, it’s remarkably well-written. It’s evocative because it’s the First World War seen through German eyes. We always see it through British eyes, though the National Theatre have taken the imaginative step of seeing through a horse’s eyes. War Horse , based on a novel by Michael Morpurgo , really is the most remarkable play. All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a German private soldier on the front line and it’s a very moving account of the deprivation and the hardship he goes through, showing us that innocent people were thrown into uniform and told to serve whether they liked it or not. Yes, I think it teaches you to see the other person’s side. Remarque went on to write A Time to Love and A Time to Die about a German soldier falling in love with a French girl and he does it with great empathy. I think with any discussion in politics and, indeed, in life, you have to remember that most things are 50/50. Nobody is 100 per cent right. I mean 60/40 is a fairly major difference. Nobody is really right or wrong and you must think that way, get into the skin of the other person. Yes, it’s very important. Of course I get asked that a lot: Who are your major influences? I mean, I read a lot and who can say which books influence you and which don’t. But I certainly hope Remarque has influenced me!"

"Well, A Tale of Two Cities is, of course, a classic love story, about all the things those awful frogs were doing, a schoolboy story really. It should have been a children’s story. That’s his genius, of course. His genius is as a storyteller. You hear the great academics saying even now that Dickens was not really a great writer. It’s sheer arrogance! But we all consider him to be a great storyteller. I think it’s partly his skill, which Shakespeare does as well, of imbuing the minor characters with as much wit and making them as sensational as the major characters. You fall in love with so many of the lesser lights because he paints them so well. And he adapts so well because of that, I think. Bleak House is a masterpiece, of course, but the television adaptation is one of the best things that has ever been on television. It’s a terrible thing to say and not true, of course, but it’s nearly as good as the book! Or as near as anything’s ever been."

"Well, it’s another children’s story really, isn’t it? Buchan died the year I was born, he was at the same college as me at Oxford, Brasenose, and he was interested in politics. He became the Governor General of Canada, of course. So, I had a natural interest. But, again, it’s a damn good story. Immortalised by Hitchcock and done again and again. If nobody had ever made it into a film it probably wouldn’t have become as famous but that’s true of so many books. Gone With the Wind, the most successful film probably of all time, made the book one of the most successful books of all time. But this book is about an old-fashioned First World War hero and it was popular at the time but somehow it still resonates because it’s a damn good story. Insider knowledge. He mixed with Prime Ministers, he mixed with civil servants, so you know that when he mentions these things he’s been there. It has that ring of truth. Like Ian Fleming’s books . Because we know he actually was a spy, well, not a spy, but he worked in intelligence … Because Bond is a farcical character in one way, but there are touches of such accuracy that he comes alive. I wouldn’t comment."

"Ah! That is your loss! You have been half asleep half your life! When I was in India the Indian Times correspondent told me not to bother with all the sacred cows of Indian literature, and we all know who she meant by those, but to read Narayan. He is a genius. I only discovered him last year and I have now read everything he has ever written. So you can discover him this year! He’s not known over here. Well, only by the intellectuals. But he is sheer magic. If you mention his name in India people stand up and cheer. They are tales of Indian life, of Indian people and these short stories are his masterpiece. I always recommend short stories when people ask me to recommend a writer. I say: “Look at the short stories and then you can decide whether you like the author enough to read the novels.” It’s a good introduction to an author. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"No. I realise looking at my choices that I should have read them when I was 14. I must have read this actually when I was 16. But it’s another schoolboy book. Again the attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now. All the snooties said: “Tell a story and make money! Good God, what a terrible thing to do!” I openly tried to write a modern version of it in A Prisoner of Birth . You see, in those days, Dumas’s days, there were no blogs, nothing like that. I mean 1,700 pages! You’d never write that today. Nobody would read it. If you are writing a long novel it’s 500 pages and that’s enough, thank you very much. Today he’d be writing television scripts."

"I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re quite right, there is a bit of Strangers on a Train to it. I found I was turning the pages and wanting to follow this strange situation. It’s about a man who meets this girl at an airport with red hair. I always wondered when I read that line—because an author is always looking for the clue that will give everything away—is the red hair going to be a clue? He sits next to her at an airport bar and tells her he’d like to murder his wife. Then, they happen to be on the same plane and they end up sitting next to each other. It’s about what happens after that, because he gets off the plane thinking, ‘Oh, well, that was just a plane journey with a woman I’ll never see again.’ But it wasn’t. For me, it was. I loved it and recommended it to a lot of people at the time because I’d never read Peter Swanson before. I have been reading him since, so it was a book that turned me into a fan. Absolutely right. The truth is that we’re all in that category. I spend my life saying to people, ‘Tell me someone I haven’t read! Tell me a book I ought to read!’ I do it all the time and get some very surprising and wonderful results. In fact, that’s how I discovered Stefan Zweig , who I think is arguably the greatest writer and storyteller of the last 100 years. I didn’t discover him until I was 60. A lady said to me, ‘It’s amazing you’ve got to this great age, Jeffrey, and not come across Stefan Zweig! He is one of the most respected authors of the last century.’ So, if you haven’t heard of Stefan Zweig, if you haven’t read his masterpiece—and I don’t call anything a masterpiece lightly—then you should. It’s called Beware of Pity . On the first page, his writing ability will hit you between the eyes. On the second, you will see why you have to turn the pages. He only wrote a couple of full-length novels. Sadly, he ended up committing suicide. He believed Hitler would take over the world and the Jews were doomed because of it."

"She’s a fine writer. I knew her in the House of Lords, of course. She was an absolutely delightful, charming person. This is the first of the Cordelia Gray series, who is a very tough, very intelligent, frankly, a very PD James woman. I mean, she could have been writing about herself. Cordelia Gray takes over the Pryde detective agency on the death of her boss and has to run it. This is the first case she comes across. She’s asked to investigate the death of a young student in Cambridge. PD James lived in Cambridge, so she knows it backwards. The father of the student is a distinguished professor and considers it suicide. He asks her to wrap it up for him, but she delves into it and discovers it wasn’t a suicide…"

"He drives me mad, Anthony Horowitz . He is a dear friend and drives me completely bonkers because you can never tell what he’s going to write next. He’s so talented and so versatile. He goes from the Alex Rider books through to Sherlock Holmes through to James Bond through to a detective story without even stopping. I don’t know how he does it. He is amazing, but this is my favorite of his. He decided to take on Sherlock Holmes. And the greatest compliment I can pay Anthony is you think it’s been written by Conan Doyle. It’s a brilliant story that starts with Watson and Sherlock Holmes sitting in their home, quietly having a drink at night, when this lunatic rushes in and tells them a mystery. They don’t believe a word of it, but they set out just because they’ve got nothing better to do—typical Holmes—and it turns into a magnificent tale. I think it’s the best thing Horowitz has ever done. He captured it, didn’t he? He captured it, which is so clever. By page 30, you think you’re actually reading Sherlock Holmes. That takes some doing. He’s a very able man, but he still gets me cross. I wish he’d concentrate on one subject so I can have book after book. I begged him to write another Sherlock Holmes. I said, ‘What I would do, Anthony, is say you bought this house and, to your shock and surprise, you discovered six manuscripts in the bottom of a drawer with Dr Watson’s signature on them. And now you’re going to make a fortune just publishing them!’ So, get on with it, Anthony. But he refused to do that and wrote another Rider book."

"It’s probably the best thing Grisham has ever done. It came out 30 years ago. It’s a wonderful story about a young man who leaves Harvard third in his class. Every law firm in the country is desperate to get hold of him. He comes from a poor family, he’s just got married, and he gets an offer he just can’t refuse. He gets a wonderful salary, wonderful provisions, wonderful everything. It includes what he thought was important at the time, a BMW. Then he discovers he’s working for the mafia. He’s a very moral man and he has to find a way out of this problem, realizing you don’t get severance pay, you just disappear. It’s a bloody good novel and it’s Grisham at his best. So, you’re a Kane and Abel fan are you? I was flattered to be asked. Thank you very much indeed. Now, if you’ve never read John Grisham, this is the one to start on, because his genius is that he was a professional lawyer as a young man, after coming down from university. What you get is the real feeling of what it’s like to work in an American firm. He captures that brilliantly because he’s done it, he’s been there. If you’ve never read him, start with The Firm."

"I think Agatha Christie would have a terrific problem nowadays, not least with Poirot and his genius because you couldn’t gather the six or seven possibly guilty people into one room and give them a lecture and then quiz them. They would just say, ‘Talk to my lawyer’ and walk out. But she could get away with that 50 years ago. The other thing she couldn’t get away with today, and she’d be the first to accept it, is DNA. My dear friend, Gilbert Gray QC, one of the great murder QCs, said it ruined his career. He was halfway through it when DNA arrived. He was getting people off, being paid amazing fees, he was the leading murder barrister in the north of England. Suddenly DNA came along, and he was losing every single case. He brought to my attention that Agatha Christie, dare one say it, died at the right time. She managed to miss DNA. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I have chosen what I think is a masterpiece. Now, there are always the snooties, and there always will be, particularly in this country. There are snobs who don’t like authors who dare to tell stories and don’t like success. Agatha Christie was a brilliant storyteller. She didn’t sell millions of books by mistake. But the best one is And Then There Were None . It’s a wonderful story about a group of people caught on an island, and someone gets murdered. And then someone else gets murdered. And then someone else gets murdered. The numbers are going down and down, and you’re wondering who is murdering all these people. The television version was quite outstanding as well, with Charles Dance playing the lead. He was terrific, I’ve never seen him better. But for those who have wondered where to start with Agatha Christie, this and The ABC Murders are frankly the two best she’s ever done, and if I had to pick just one, I would pick And Then There Were None. Her biographers say she first got the story from a German author and then wrote her version of it. I have no problem with that at all because I suspect her version of it was far superior. But it wasn’t her usual theme, it wasn’t her normal, ‘This is a jolly good read, enjoy Christmas!’ That’s what she was famous for, ‘Have a Christie at Christmas.’ This wasn’t exactly a fun, Christmas stocking book. As I say, it was suggested she originally read the story by not a well-known, but not an unknown German author. I’m hardly one to complain because I attempted to rewrite The Count of Monte Cristo in the form of A Prisoner of Birth . I made it very clear that was the case. So many authors rely on stories and, frankly, the great line that there are only six great stories and all we do is variations on them may indeed have an element of truth."