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From：CHINA DAILY EUROPEAN WEEKLY

A TWIST IN THE TALE

AUTHOR JEFFREY ARCHER WANTS TO ADD CHINESE TO HIS GROWING NUMBER OF READERS

 By ANDREW MOODY

Jeffrey Archer, one of the world’s most prolific best-selling authors, is keen to conquer China.

The most populous country is one of the few markets where the 71-year-old author is not a house?hold name.

His most successful book Kane and Abel, which has sold 33 million copies worldwide and is now on its 84th reprint, however, has just been translated into Chinese and will be published by local publisher Tian?jin Huawen Tianxia Publishing in China in August.

“I will love having a crack at China. I definitely want to get in on that market,” he says.

Archer was sprawled out on a luxurious sofa at his famous pent?house London home overlooking the Thames with a panoramic view of the Houses of Parliament in the near distance.

If there were any doubt about the wealth that can be created by selling so many books, it would be dispelled by even a cursory glance at the paintings that bedeck the inner walls — his art collection alone is reputedly worth 100 million pounds (113 million euros).

Apart from Kane and Abel, two more of his most popular books, Shall We Tell the President and The Prodigal Daughter, are being trans?lated and will be published this autumn in China.

“I wish we could do what we are doing in India. I have been No 1 (on the best-seller list) in India for the past 10 weeks and I would love to do the same in China,” he says.

“It would be strange if I didn’t since I am No 1 everywhere else.”

Archer, whose boundless energy didn’t seem to wilt from the slight greenhouse effect the late spring sunshine was managing to create through the glass walls of his expan?sive apartment, is very keen to go to China to promote his books but admits to being unsure about how the market operates.

“It is very strange but I have no feel for it. I wouldn’t be shocked if three people turned up for a signing. I also wouldn’t be shocked if 3,000 people turned up,” he says.

There was one previous attempt to launch Archer’s earlier books in China many years ago by Yilin Press but the company’s licenses have now expired. The new Chi?nese publisher is keen to make up for lost time.

Pan MacMillan Asia, the author’s main English-language publisher in the region, says his sales in China have increased 15 times this year but largely due to the increased open?ing-up of the country’s publishing market.

Archer, who was made a member of the House of Lords by former prime minister Sir John Major in 1992, has never visited the Chinese mainland.

“I have been to Hong Kong several times and I would even go so far as saying that I am desperate to go to the mainland for a proper visit,” he says.

His desire to go now has been partly fueled by a recent visit by his scientist wife Lady Archer, who is chair of Cambridge University Hospitals, one of the UK’s leading medical institutions.

“Mary told me in great detail about what she was doing. I read her report, of course. She actually learnt a lot. It made me realize if she wanted to go out there, I should do the same,” he says.

Apart from wanting to reach the China market, Archer is currently promoting his latest book, Only Time Will Tell, which will be part of five-book series called The Clifton Chronicles.

The series will follow the life of the central character Harry Clifton, who becomes a writer, through his 100-year life that ends in his death in 2020. Archer admits the Chronicles will be semi-autobiographical and he thinks giving a character such a long lifespan will be timely.

“By the time the fifth book is read, living to 100 will be fairly common. Looking at the obituaries this morn?ing in the Daily Telegraph, one was 93 and others 91, 87, 89 and 71. At my age I look at these things more clearly,” he says.

Archer divides his time between London, his home at Granchester, near Cambridge (the house where war poet Rupert Brooke used to live and regarded as one of the most idyllic in England) and a house he has had built in Mallorca, where he has a writing room cut out of the cli??. He travels to the Balearic island by low-cost airline Easyjet.

“I can be there from Cambridge in just two hours. I do all my writing now in Mallorca. All I can see when I am sitting in my study is just water. It is just heaven,” he says.

Archer has had something of a rollercoaster life and career. He was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative MP at the age of 29 but resigned four years later when he nearly went bankrupt after investing in a fraudulent investment scheme.

To get out of a financial hole he wrote his first book Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less that set him on the course of his best-sell?ing career.

“If you came to me now and said that you were in a bit of financial trouble and that you were going to write a book, I would say that was the last thing you should do and you would be better getting a job as a bus conductor,” he says.

Archer still kept a hand in poli?tics and was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in the 1980s when Lady Thatcher — who he still sees regularly — was prime minister.

He was running for London may?or before his biggest ever setback, being sent to prison in 2001 for four years (of which he served two) for committing perjury in a previous libel trial.

That he has come back with seven further bestsellers, includ?ing two books of prison diaries, has displayed an indefatigability that even his harshest critics have had to grudgingly admire.

“If you make a fool of yourself and things go wrong, you get up and get forward. I can’t see any point in sit?ting around and crying for the next 10 years. You need to move on,” he says.

At the moment, he is hoping the Chinese not only buy his books but some of his paintings also.

At Christie’s in London on June 28 he is selling some of his art collec?tions, including French impression?ist works by Monet and Brouillard, beloved by many Asian buyers.

The conservative estimate of the works up for sale is 7.5 million pounds.

“I think the serious Chinese col?lectors will want Brouillard because he is under-priced and I am hoping they turn up for that. The Chinese are arguably the biggest buyers in the market at the moment and many of them are from the mainland,” he says.

Archer, who has a disciplined writing regime of four periods of two hours a day, the first starting at 6 am, produces everything by hand.

“I don’t know how to use a com?puter. I know that people think it is mad. My wife has promised to buy me an iPad for my birthday and show me how to use it,” he says.

He is currently driven by his lat?est project, which he describes as a pentology, and which he expects to complete by 2016 at the latest. It was almost a 70th birthday challenge.

“Terrific focus challenge, isn’t it? Five books. Don’t worry about anything else. Focus on it and do it,” he says.

The "Clifton Chronicles" is Jeffrey Archer's most ambitious work in four decades as an international bestselling author. The epic tale of Harry Clifton's life begins in 1920, with the chilling words, 'I was told that my father was killed in the war'. But it will be another twenty years before Harry discovers how his father really died, which will only lead him to question: who was his father? Is he the son of Arthur Clifton, a stevedore who worked in Bristol docks, or the first born son of a scion of West Country society, whose family owns a shipping line? "Only Time Will Tell" covers the years from 1920 to 1940, and includes a cast of memorable characters that "The Times" has compared to "The Forsyte Saga". Volume one takes us from the ravages of the Great War to the outbreak of the Second World War, when Harry must decide whether to take up a place at Oxford, or join the navy and go to war with Hitler's Germany. In Jeffrey Archer's masterful hands, the reader is taken on a journey that they won't want to end, and when you turn the last page of this unforgettable yarn, you will be faced with a dilemma that neither you, nor Harry Clifton could have anticipated.

Jeffrey Archer, whose novels and short stories include Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, Kane and Abel and A Twist in the Tale, has topped the bestseller lists around the world, with sales of over 250 million copies. He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction (fourteen times), short stories (four times) and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries). The author is married with two sons, and lives in London and Cambridge. www.jeffreyarcher.com