Jeffrey Archer, who died last Monday (yesterday) aged 86, was a British writer who also became an Indian literary institution.For generations of Indian readers, particularly those who discovered English-language fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, Kane and Abel was not simply another bestseller. It was often the book that opened the door to the world of adult fiction. Archer understood that affection and, unlike many successful British authors, never took the Indian audience for granted.He returned to India repeatedly, often to crowds that astonished him. At one Bangalore appearance, he recalled that about 1,000 people had come to hear him, with roughly 80 per cent under 20.“Fifty million Indians have read Kane and Abel,” he once claimed.The figure may have been exaggerated but there was no doubting the affection behind it. His books were everywhere in India, passed from hand to hand, borrowed from friends and found in railway-station bookstalls and bookshops from Delhi to Mumbai.Archer visited India almost every year from 2008 onwards, and in 2011 began the worldwide tour for Only Time Will Tell in Bangalore. The book went on to sell more than 48,000 copies in India that year, according to Nielsen BookScan figures.Born in London in 1940, Archer had a life that could itself have been constructed by one of his more imaginative plots. He entered the Parliament as a Conservative MP at 29, only to leave the Commons after a disastrous investment left him deeply in debt. He turned to writing to repair his finances, producing Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less in 1976.Kane and Abel was another archetypal Archer story: two men born on the same day but into completely different circumstances, their lives driven by ambition, wealth, class, rivalry and revenge. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies and India embraced it with particular enthusiasm.Subsequently, India appeared increasingly in his work. Six chapters of Cometh the Hour were set in Bombay, while one of the stories in Thereby Hangs a Tale involved a Delhi couple who fall in love at a traffic signal.At the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2019, 7,500 people reportedly came to hear him. On another occasion, Indian businessmen hosted Archer and his wife, Mary, for a dinner at which every course was named after one of his books. The menu included dishes inspired by Mightier than the Sword, First Among Equals, Nothing Ventured, Only Time Will Tell and, inevitably, Kane and Abel.For Archer, whose life had contained spectacular reversals, India represented something rather different: a remarkably consistent source of affection.His political career had risen almost as spectacularly as his literary one, and then collapsed. Margaret Thatcher appointed him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in 1985. A year later he resigned amid the controversy surrounding allegations involving a sex worker and subsequently sued the Daily Star, winning £500,000 in damages.More than a decade later, the affair returned to haunt him. During his unsuccessful campaign to become London’s first elected mayor, it emerged that he had lied during the earlier libel proceedings. He was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in prison in 2001.For most writers, such a downfall would have ended a career. For Archer, it became another chapter.During his imprisonment he wrote A Prison Diary, producing thousands of words a day. After his release, he resumed writing with extraordinary determination, producing the seven-volume Clifton Chronicles and subsequently the William Warwick detective novels.He eventually retired from the House of Lords in 2024.And he kept writing.His final novel, Adam & Eve, was published on October 6, one day after his death. HarperCollins said that Archer died “suddenly and peacefully” at home between writing sessions. He had been promoting the book only the day before.Adam & Eve returns to a theme that had fascinated him since Kane and Abel: two people born on the same day into entirely different worlds. This time it is Armistice Day, 1918, and the protagonists are a shepherd’s son and an earl’s daughter.He had decided it would be his last novel. His publisher said he told his editor that he wanted to finish his career with a book that could stand alongside his best work.He did not get to see it published.But he leaves behind more than 300 million books sold around the world, a writing career spanning half a century, and an audience that crossed class, geography and generations.And nowhere was that audience more devoted than in India.Archer once said that Indians were his “natural friends”. Perhaps that explains something about the extraordinary bond between the man and the country. Indian readers did not necessarily approach Archer looking for literary prestige. They wanted the thing he had promised them from the beginning: a good story, told well enough to make them turn the page.And he gave them thousands of pages.For millions of Indians, Jeffrey Archer was not simply a British bestseller. He was the writer who revealed how reading could be addictive.