Lord Jeffrey Archer began writing books in 1974 and became a best-selling author almost immediately. Here are four titles to get you introduced to his oeuvre. His books have been translated into several languages and adapted into screenplays, television, films, and radio plays. A master of pulp fiction , Archer kept his writing simple, and his worldview even simpler. Readers were never left in doubt over what or who constituted good and evil in these novels. Retribution was a given, and evil men often met with a bad end. In a breathless world of constant change, Archer’s novels offered a corner of succour where the reader could con themselves into believing all was indeed well.
The book underwent several reprints—134, as of 2025—and is one of the author’s best-selling novels. Only Time Will Tell is the first in the Clifton Chronicles, which starts with the birth of Harry Clifton, born in the backstreets of Bristol in 1919, and follows his life as well as the lives of his a large cast of characters including his biological father, Hugo Barrington, friend Giles Barrington, wife, Emma, and son Sebastian, through the large sweep of the 20th century. Always a prolific writer, Archer produced six more titles in a five-year span: Sins of the Father, Best Kept Secret, Be Careful What You Wish For, Mightier Than The Sword, Cometh the Hour and the final, This Was A Man, which came out in 2016.
Borrowing the title from the Biblical characters, Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s sons, Archer’s novel traces the story of William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, who represent polar opposites. They’re born on the same day, but while William is born into a rich Boston family, Abel is the son of a penniless Polish immigrant. Fate brings them together, often as each other’s saviours and as one another’s nemesis. Harry Clifton betrayed Archer’s nostalgic longing for a simpler world of high values, human decency in the face of greed, wrath and violence, and a belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Archer’s readers took comfort in this binary worldview through which Archer presented all the major events of the 20th century, from the two World Wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Like his later successful novels, Kane and Abel does two things right in this one: he sets it across a large span of time (in this case, sixty years) so that the readers are invested in the protagonists’ many ups and downs; and two, he sets the two men up in a binary that gives the readers a heady view of alternating perspectives that keep them tightly in thrall.
