After 50 Years, Author Jeffrey Will Put Away His Pen (Exclusive)

Storyteller Jeffrey Archer’s new book, End Game (out Sept. 23), signals the close of a run of eight books with his cop hero William Warwick — and heralds the imminent end of his novel-writing.

Fifty years after his first novel Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less was published (with a first print run of just 3,000), Archer is writing his last novel. Bathed in autumn sunshine in his penthouse apartment high above the River Thames, Kane and Abel author Archer, 85, tells PEOPLE, “I’m going to write my final book.”

Before then, the last in his series of William Warwick books, End Game, presents a new “what if?” for readers: How close was the 2012 London Olympics to suffering a foreign state-backed terror attack? What if the late Queen Elizabeth didn’t make it to the opening ceremony that became famously associated with her lookalike parachuting into the arena from a helicopter?

End Game sees Warwick once again up against nemesis Miles Faulkner and his crooked lawyer Booth Watson. It follows recent episodes of the Warwick story focusing on whether the Crown Jewels could be stolen and the secret world of the intricate art forger. Mercifully, the millions of people who attended the games and watched on TV were none the wiser about the efforts going on behind the scenes to keep people safe.

The author drew the real-life examples from talking to Commander Bob Broadhurst, head of security for those heady weeks in London. “He just didn’t give me two stories — he gave me 14,” Archer says. “And two of them, of course, would have closed the games.”

With a twinkle in his eye, the famed author says he used each of the 14 scenarios that Broadhurst gave him — and then invented another eight (the list is at the back of the novel, tempting readers to guess which were real and imagined) for Warwick and his team to tackle.

“If you met [Broadhurst], you’d see he’s very calm, very cool. Nothing washes over him,” Archer says, adding a quote And he fishes out a quote from Broadhurst that sums it up: “A successful security operation has no headlines and no heroes, but it’s remarkable how close we came.”

And now, it’s time to retire Warwick. “I thought the arc of Constable, Sergeant, Inspector, Chief Inspector, Superintendent Chief Superintendent, was natural. I talked to two [police chiefs] and they said, ‘You hit the right jobs that are really worth doing — you know, drugs, murder, royal protection, fraud.”

The author teases that his next and final book “is better than Kane and Abel,” referring to his most famous work, which is now in print in 119 countries and 47 languages.

“When I told my publishers the idea six years ago, they begged me to stop writing the William Warwick books and do it immediately. And I said, “No, I’ll live to 86. Don’t worry.” I had to finish the arc.”

He remains tight-lipped about his new project, beyond saying it is based on the wartime rivalry of Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill and that he was intrigued by a sentence in one of Hitler’s speeches.

“Then I read a speech by Winston Churchill, countering Hitler’s. I realized that in 1936, they already sensed they were going to be up against each other,” he says. “I found that fascinating.”

Archer made his name writing family saga Kane and Abel, which was to be his savior – and his route to paying off huge debts that had him facing bankruptcy.

Those hard times had inspired his first book Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less. That had been turned down by 14 publishers and he was offered only a £3,000 advance for the manuscript. Married to Cambridge university professor Mary, they had two sons, aged around 5 and 3, at the time. “And my wife was saying, don’t you think it’s time you’ve got a real job because 3,000 copies is not exactly a triumph.”

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British author Anthony Horowitz praises Archer’s first book for “not just the cleverness of its construction but the pace of the storytelling.” He adds, “These are Jeffrey Archer’s hallmarks and it’s remarkable that, now in his eighties, he has lost none of his energy. I see him from time to time — we have combative lunches together — and he’s still one of the most fascinating and thoughtful men I know.”

As the bestsellers from First Among Equals, to his more recent Clifton Chronicles series kept flowing, Archer combined his novel-writing career with that of a politician, serving first as a Member of Parliament and then as one of Margaret Thatcher’s trusted lieutenants as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. He became friends with the late Princess Diana and the Duchess of Kent, whose requiem mass he attended on Sept. 16.

In 2001, he had to face a different reality. Archer was sentenced to prison for four years (he served two) for perjury following a libel case with a British tabloid, the Daily Star. But Archer turned to what he knew to get him through. Writing, he said, “kept me sane” and his three volumes of Prison Diaries became surprise hits. He says, “I thought they’d be a passing thing.”

Adds Horowitz: “It’s clear that his entire life has been as wild and unpredictable as his stories — and the two collide with his Prison Diaries which remain one of the best accounts of life in jail and a testament to his extraordinary resilience.”

Today, more than two decades on, Archer is clear-eyed about his lucky breaks. “I realized how privileged I was. I have never got over the young man who sat on the end of my bed. He was about 24 and said, I’ll swap places with you. I said ‘What do you mean? I’m 60. I’m a boring old toad.’ He said, ‘I’m 24, I’m a drug addict. I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.’ He died two years later. So I think it woke me up just how lucky I was.”

“I had a strong family, was financially secure. I wasn’t coming out to ‘How will I earn tomorrow’s penny?’” He did worry, though, if the “readers would desert me.” They didn’t.

With some of his books getting optioned for TV series and movies again (and Bradley Cooper, he says, is among two parties who have asked about rights to Kane and Abel recently) Archer is not taking the deals for granted. “My son quite rightly says, ‘Don’t celebrate, dad, until you’re eating the popcorn.’ And I think he’s right.”

And if none of those come to fruition, there will be more from Archer, who writes for two hours each morning, starting at 6 a.m.

“That gives me over 700 hours a year. And I just keep to it,” he says. “I will write short stories. I may write screenplays. I may write a play, but the next book is going to be the final one.”

End Game by Jeffrey Archer hits shelves on Sept. 23 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.