Trivia / Jeffrey Archer

• Life Imitates Art: Archer's play The Accused is a courtroom drama, the twist being that the audience is the jury and gets to vote on whether or not they think the defendant is guilty — meaning that two final scenes were written, with whichever one the audience votes for getting performed. When the play premiered in Windsor in 2000, Archer himself played the defendant. A year later, he was on trial for real, accused of perjury and perverting the course of justice. The jury found him guilty.
• Write What You Know: There are various examples of this in Archer's novels, especially when it comes to art (he's an avid art collector who briefly ran an art gallery in the late 1960s), politics (he's a former MP) and prison (he did two years for perjury and perverting the course of justice, serving part of his sentence in Belmarsh prison). Notable examples are:
  • The four main characters in First Among Equals are MPs who all want to be the Prime Minister.
  • The MacGuffin in False Impression is a Van Gogh painting. Plus, one of the characters ends up in Belmarsh prison.
  • Large parts of A Prisoner of Birth take place in Belmarsh prison.
  • In The Sins of the Father, protagonist Harry Clifton writes a diary while in prison which gets published — just like his creator!
  • The protagonist of Nothing Ventured is a police officer investigating the theft of a Rembrandt painting from an art gallery.

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