I discovered Jeffrey Archer in a small bookshelf in Doha, long before I knew anything about his politics, his wealth, his scandals or the extraordinary complications of his life.
My father was a chemist at QAFCO, the Qatari fertiliser company, where he worked for three decades. I grew up there and went to school in Qatar through my Higher Secondary years. Ours was a small but growing Bangladeshi white-collar community, living in clusters, where life could become very monotonous.
Weekends provided the escape. Families visited one another. Adults talked; children found whatever amusement was available in somebody else's house. It was during one such visit that I found Archer.
A school boro bhai had a modest collection of English novels. He was preparing for the TOEFL and planning to study in the United States, so he had been reading them to improve his English.
One cover caught my eye: Kane & Abel.
I was probably in Grade Seven. By then, I was a voracious reader, but almost entirely in Bangla. Every two years, when we visited Dhaka, I would return to Doha with a suitcase stuffed with books. My English reading, meanwhile, barely extended beyond Radiant Reading, the familiar school text.
I opened Kane & Abel and turned a few pages. Then a few more. I borrowed it. That was how Jeffrey Archer entered my life and then would stay there for decades.
Archer, the British novelist and former Conservative politician whose books sold more than 300 million copies worldwide, died suddenly and peacefully at home on October 5. He was 86. His death came one day before the publication of Adam and Eve, the novel he had already announced would be his last.
By then, I had read all his books.
For me, Archer was also a gateway. Once I had crossed the language barrier with Kane & Abel, the world of English popular fiction opened up… Sidney Sheldon, John Grisham and many others followed.
But Archer was first.
There is something fitting about discovering Archer by accident and then being unable to put him down. He understood, perhaps better than almost anyone in popular fiction, the elementary but difficult business of making a reader want to know what happens next.
His prose was never the point. Critics could be savage about it. Archer's gift was momentum. The chapters were short. A revelation appeared just as the story seemed settled. A character gained everything and then lost it. The last paragraph made you read the first paragraph of the next chapter, and suddenly it was well past midnight.
Kane and Abel, published in 1979, became his defining novel. It followed William Lowell Kane, born into Boston privilege, and Abel Rosnovski, a penniless Polish immigrant, two men born on the same day whose lives become locked together across decades.
The novel eventually sold more than 30 million copies. Archer's publisher said his books altogether sold more than 300 million copies around the world.
That success would have been remarkable enough for someone who had simply decided to become a novelist. Archer did it because his first career had imploded.
Born in London on April 15, 1940, and raised in Weston-super-Mare, Archer arrived at Oxford and then entered politics with astonishing speed. He won a seat on the Greater London Council in 1967 and entered Parliament as Conservative MP for Louth in 1969, aged 29.
Then came the financial disaster. A disastrous investment left him close to bankruptcy in 1974. He left the Commons and turned to fiction.
His first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, appeared in 1976. Appropriately, it was about people who had been swindled trying to recover their money.
Then came Kane and Abel, The Prodigal Daughter, First Among Equals, As the Crow Flies, the Clifton Chronicles and, much later, the William Warwick novels.
He wrote in longhand and revised obsessively. Well into his eighties, he was still producing books at a rate that would exhaust writers half his age.
In January, announcing Adam and Eve as his final novel, Archer said he could not imagine putting his pen down entirely. It was his 31st novel, arriving 50 years after his debut. He died between writing sessions.
His novels were full of ambition, reversals, improbable recoveries and men who climbed too high. His own life contained all of them.
Margaret Thatcher made him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in 1985. He was a formidable fundraiser, an irrepressible public performer and a man who seemed constitutionally incapable of remaining outside the room where something important was happening.
Then came the scandal that would eventually destroy his political career. in 1986 that Archer had paid money to a prostitute. He denied wrongdoing and sued the newspaper. In 1987, he won £500,000 in damages.
It was a spectacular victory but it was also built on a lie.
Years later, evidence emerged that Archer had fabricated an alibi and manipulated evidence. His attempt to become London's first elected mayor collapsed in 1999 after the deception became public.
In 2001, he was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in prison. He served two.
No account of Archer should smooth over that part of his life simply because he wrote entertaining books. Charm was one of his great assets. It was also, for a long time, a form of protection.
He had risen through British public life on confidence, connections and an extraordinary ability to command a room. The same qualities that made him an effective politician, fundraiser and storyteller helped him persuade people who should perhaps have been less easily persuaded.
The courtroom finally proved less forgiving than his readers.
Prison could have been the final chapter. For Archer, naturally, it became another book.
As Prisoner FF8282, he kept notes about incarceration and turned them into three volumes of prison diaries: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. They sold.
Then he went back to novels. His readers, by and large, went back with him.
That relationship between Archer and his audience is perhaps more important to understanding him than the approval of literary critics. He knew what his readers wanted, and he never appeared embarrassed about giving it to them.
He was not trying to be Salman Rushdie. He was trying to make you miss your bedtime. There is considerable skill in that.
His later novels became more predictable. The machinery became easier to see: the rivalry, the reversal, the hidden connection, the cliffhanger. But the machinery usually worked.
Archer also remained an energetic charity fundraiser and auctioneer. His long public life put him alongside prime ministers, business leaders and royalty; photographs from the 1990s show him at charity events with Princess Diana. He remained in the House of Lords until retiring in 2024.
Through almost everything stood Mary Weeden, whom he married in 1966. Dame Mary Archer, a scientist, remained with him through political ascent, disgrace, prison and literary rehabilitation. They had two sons, William and James.
Only hours before his death, Archer had still been meeting readers. His final novel was waiting to reach bookshops. And somewhere in all this — the Conservative Party, the peerage, the libel trial, the prison sentence, the millions of copies sold — is another Jeffrey Archer, one he could never have known.
He is the Archer sitting on a small bookshelf in a Bangladeshi household in Doha. That is the one I remember most clearly.
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Yusuf Banna is a full-time poet and a part-time journalist