You always want what you can’t have. My brother had the entire Jeffrey Archer collection, kept in the hallway between his bedroom and the bathroom. The gold lettering called out to the teenage me every time I went to the lavatory. I was desperate to read them, but he refused to let me (perhaps because of my tendency to lose things under mounds of mess in my bedroom only for them to turn up months later in a ragged state under the bed).
So I would wait until my brother was asleep, then go to the bathroom — grabbing one as I went and listening in case he woke up. There, snuggled between the loo and the bath, I read these great stories of greed, rivalry, love, trust and ambition.
I loved the stories that spanned a lifetime, sometimes several, such as the tale of William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, both seeking to create a fortune and destroy each other in Kane and Abel, and the ruthless pursuit of power and high office in First Among Equals. For sheer page-turnability and excitement, for rags-to-riches victory and the triumph of the little guy, they put more recent thrillers to shame — at no time as I read The Da Vinci Code did my heart quicken the way it used to with Archer in the bathroom.
I lived for those late-night sessions. I suspect that if my parents had known I wanted the books so much they would have bought me my own copies, but the deceit, as Archer himself would understand so well, was part of the thrill.
I really haven’t read any novel by Ann Widdecombe.
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Her hard line on prisons means that if she was in charge she may well have confiscated Archer’s pen and paper when he was incarcerated. That would have been a travesty.