Archers in town

Dear Mr. Archer,

It was great meeting you at landmark the other day. Must confess that I have read many of your books and at one point, I owned over ten of them.

Have been wondering about quite a number of things about your writing-

a. It is quite evident that none of your books have been made as movies but have only made it to TV versions and adaptions. Do your plots not lend themselves to the movie format or is your asking price too high?

b. Is it true that in order to fight the advent of movies and TV, one tends to write more action centric novels and not character novels that you are good at. At the turn of the last century, there were many great books written -with long elaborate character sketches and a long winding scripts -all of which we bundle together as classics. The world war finished all that style of writing and gave birth to 'cold-war' writing with thrillers from - alistair maclean, forsyth, tom clancy, ian fleming, sheldon etc. focussed on the cold war and espionage. You have avoided all this and focused on drama. Are you afraid of action?

c. Everyone has a specialised in a certain form of fiction - Michael Chricton - science fiction; Grisham - legal, Tom clancy - cold war, Steven king - horror; each has had many movie version successes as action lends itself well to movies. You have stayed focussed on drama, relatiosnhips and middle class aspirations- more TV stuff than movies material.

With Paths of glory being a real life story and your next book being a re-writing of Kane and Abel- maybe you have finally run out of stories. In fact, the last 4 of your books are real life- including your prison diaries. In response to a query on your favourite books, you had said that 'The Count of Monte Christo'( I have always thought your favourite own book 'Not a penny more,not a penny less' was actually inspired from Dumas's novel ) and All quiet on the western front ( you happily signed this one for me) were your best and amongst your own books ,your wife liked 'As the Crow flies'. My favourite is 'First amongst equals'- liked everything about it from the title to the way the story pans out and the way it ends.

Hope to have a book of my own for you to sign when I meet you next time.

cheers
naveen

p.s. You are very right when you say that while we could accept coincidences in real life, we quite dislike them in stories.