In an age where crown jewels serve as a euphemism at best for most, British bestselling writer and one-time Tory politician Jeffrey Archer tries to weave a thriller around their theft, almost like a post-Brexit ’wanna be’ clamouring to be let into the heist hall of fame. The heist genre has celebrated everything from robbing Fort Knox to the Royal Mint of Spain, the latter in Netflix’s wildly popular Money Heist.
If Archer, an established master of the racy airport paperback genre, is trying to compete with Netflix and its ilk for passenger eyeballs during a flight, Traitors Gate is probably not the right offering. Make no mistake, the premise is mighty beguiling―about a thief who orchestrates an elaborate heist of the crown jewels. ‘Traitor’s Gate’ refers to the water gate entrance to the Tower of London, which had a rather ironic dual role of housing criminals as well as safeguarding the royal crown, orb, sceptre, and other invaluable state treasures. Putting criminals and treasures under one roof―would that be British irony at work?
However, in Archer’s supposed thriller, it is not the prisoners (they aren’t there anymore) who dare to pull it off, but an ex-prisoner and master criminal Miles Faulkner. He tries to do the impossible―steal the crown jewels while they are being taken to the Buckingham Palace for the Queen to wear while delivering her annual state address to the British Parliament. (The story is conveniently set in the late 1990s, with more than one sarcastic reference, and one glaring factual error, about Princess Diana).
The problem is with Archer’s writing. The plot meanders along, introducing a multitude of characters, and taking its own sweet time to flesh out, rather thinly, their characteristics, motives, back stories and idiosyncrasies. The characters remain words on paper, never quite coming alive in the reader’s mind, and the motive of revenge hardly sounds convincing enough.
The promised gasp-inducing, audacious attempt does not materialise in the first half of the book, as Archer lazily weaves a plot that almost feels like it is another story. It lacks that ‘unputdownable’ quality that should be at the core of a paperback thriller.
It is said that Archer does most of his writing at his holiday home in Spain’s beach resort of Majorca. Could that be the reason for the languorous pace? After his Clifton Chronicles series, this is his sixth book featuring police sleuth William Warwick. Maybe it is because he expects his readers to have read the earlier books that he lets Warwick remain unfleshed out.
In a recent interview, Archer spoke about how a member of the royal household gave him the idea for the book during a luxury ocean cruise by telling him about possibly the only way the crown jewels could be stolen. Inspired, Archer is supposed to have done his thorough research, checking out the various routes, both road and tube, between the Tower and the Palace, as well as how perfectly the crown can be counterfeited. It would have served this book better if he had harked back to his plot techniques in classics like Kane and Abel, and tried ‘counterfeiting’ them in this work.
TRAITORS GATE
By Jeffrey Archer
Published by HarperCollins
Price Rs499; pages 356