Jeffrey Archer and the prisoner’s canon: writers who wrote behind bars

In 2001, the British Conservative politician and novelist Jeffrey Archer (who died on October 5, aged 86) went to prison for two years (albeit sentenced for four) after it emerged that he had perjured himself during an earlier defamation trial. Archer was in his early 60s at the time and a worldwide celebrity, thanks to globally bestselling titles like Kane and Abel (1979), First Among Equals (1984) and The Fourth Estate (1996), potboilers featuring ambitious, tragically flawed protagonists navigating the corridors of power in politics, business, the media and so on.

As Archer said in several interviews after his release in 2003, prison unlocked an altogether different writing gear for an already prolific man. By his estimate, he wrote over a million words in 2001 during that first year of incarceration, which averages out to just over 2,700 words per day. Across his two years behind bars, Archer wrote a three-volume prison diary, titled A Prison Diary, with its three volumes named after the three parts of Dante’s The Divine Comedy: ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Heaven’. It ran to over 1,100 pages. A short story collection called Cat O’ Nine Tales followed a few years later, with 9 of the 12 stories beginning life as hastily-scribbled accounts told by fellow convicts.

Navigating barriers

In doing so, Archer contributed to what one may term the ‘prisoner’s canon’, books that were written or substantially begun while their authors were imprisoned. It’s a group that’s far larger and much more diverse than you’d think, with writers from all around the world, their offences ranging from petty theft (Jean Genet), embezzlement (O. Henry), “debauchery” (Marquis de Sade) and financial irregularities (Miguel de Cervantes), all the way up to wife-strangling (Louis Althusser) and serial murder (Jack Unterweger).

It is often said that Cervantes began writing his masterpiece Don Quixote while in prison in Spain in the late 1590s over irregularities in his accounts. In the prologue to Don Quixote, Cervantes writes that the book “was begotten in prison”. There is, however, some difference of opinion among scholars as to just how much of the book he wrote while imprisoned. An understandable query, because it’s not like most prisons (medieval or otherwise) were/ are overflowing with comfy stationery and ergonomic office supplies.

In fact, while reading historical accounts involving the aforementioned ‘prisoner’s canon’, a common thread is the crippling scarcity of writing material, especially paper. The late French novelist and playwright Jean Genet wrote his acclaimed debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944) while imprisoned for theft in Paris in the early 1940s. Remarkably, Genet wrote and rewrote the book on brown paper bags. Sometimes, the barriers are as much mental as material. The French writer and philosopher Louis Althusser wrote his memoir The Future Lasts Forever while institutionalised (he was declared insane) after strangling his wife to death in 1980 — during the book, he notes with bitter irony that his periods of lucidity were mostly spent mapping the trajectories of his madness.

The limits of redemption

Another very common thread is the elusive nature of redemption. Writers who end up behind bars have a renewed appreciation for the fact that there are very few convenient Hollywood-style redemptive endings in real life. The Austrian writer, journalist and serial killer Jack Unterweger used his (admittedly impressive) prison writings in the 1980s in his campaign for early release (he had been convicted of a lone murder), backed by Austrian writers and intellectuals.

Upon his release, he even started working full-time as a journalist. But before long, a killing spree ensued and eventually Unterweger was convicted again and died by suicide in 1994. The Will Self short story ‘The Nonce Prize’ is also worth a read in this context — part of his collection Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998) is a dark comedy involving an intra-prison writing contest that tells us the limits of rehabilitation through literature.

Archer’s darker twist

We can observe flashes of this hard-knuckle cynicism in Archer’s post-prison work as well. In Archer’s short story 'Maestro’ from Cat O’ Nine Tales, we meet the comically affable and charming Italian restaurateur Mario Gambotti who is in jail for tax fraud — or so we are led to believe. Up until the story’s third act, Archer presents this character as a bit of a guileless fool, tricked into tax fraud by shady accountants and malicious advisors. With a typical Archer twist ending that subverts the reader’s expectations of redemption, Gambotti turns out to be a wanted gangster in a previous life, responsible for heinous crimes, including murder and extortion.

What, then, did Jeffrey Archer learn behind bars? In the foreword to the first volume of A Prison Diary, he makes the gentlest of admissions fairly early on: “When you look at anybody who gets a lot of attention, they end up making mistakes. I’ve certainly made my share of mistakes and mine ended with two years in prison. Two very remarkable years that I have learned a lot from.” How sincere you believe this to be depends upon your opinion of Archer the man. But there’s no doubt that Archer the writer and Archer the public figure were indelibly affected by his prison stint. After his release, he wrote newspaper articles about the need for prison reforms, most importantly, the need for widespread literacy programmes in prison. He spoke about his time in prison during interviews with admirable candour.

Ever the showman, he even embraced the ‘jailbird writer’ persona by calling his first post-incarceration novel A Prisoner of Birth, the name reminding readers just what went into the making of this book. In Archer’s novel Best Kept Secret (2013), there’s a line that goes: “The sign of a great man is how you handle defeat.” I don’t think Archer was a great man but he certainly knew how to handle setbacks, and his post-imprisonment writings present us with more than enough proof. 

The writer is working on his first book of non-fiction.