I’m at work. I’m bored. Make me laugh.

Trawl Rockall for:

Police cast doubt on veracity of Archer diaries

Fraud Squad detectives are investigating claims that disgraced Lord Archer's prison diaries are fakes.

Experts first raised the alarm when readers noted that the best-selling novelist's jail memoirs did not include any one-dimensional characters dumped unceremoniously into a facile plot.

The diaries have been serialised in The Daily Mail — a newspaper which believes that crime should not pay, nor should the criminal be rewarded for his crimes. Unless they're Lord Archer — a liar and convicted perjurer — whose latest literary offering has failed dismally to demonstrate his preferred technique of implausible dialogue fighting cliché for the reader's attentions.

"Not quite the worst book I have ever read," claimed Detective Inspector Jim Singleton who is leading the investigation into the diaries. He told The Rockall Times: "We are working on a tip-off that another lag ghosted the diaries. They could be the work of "Sammy the Spanner" who Lord Archer befriended while in prison. Since his release Sammy has been seen driving Archer's BMW in the Guilford area. He has also been spotted giving packages to prostitutes and has purchased a large number of shares in Anglia Television."

The diaries were first offered to The Sunday Times for serialisation but lawyers at the paper became suspicious at their lack of semi-autobiographical comic book heroes and stereotypical villains — a trademark of Archer's writing style. The newspaper declined the offer — not because it feared a repeat of the 1980s Hitler Diaries debacle — but simply because it wasn't interested and had found something else to write about.

 Email an enemy  Pub-friendly printable version  ‘World News’ index page