Archer’s ‘Doubt’ to Have U.S. Premiere in Laguna : Stage: Best-selling British novelist’s courtroom drama all began with a question. His work’s success proves he was no fool for asking it.

Does an attorney who handles his own case have a fool for a client? Common wisdom says so, but best-selling British novelist and playwright Jeffrey Archer asked his mother. After all, he was only 11 years old at the time.

“My mother had taken me to see ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ with Charles Laughton--and I had fallen in love with it,” Archer said recently from London, where his own courtroom drama, “Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” is still running after three years and more than 1,000 performances. The U.S. premiere opens tonight in a production by the Laguna Playhouse.

Recalling the long-ago moment that spurred him to query his mother, the 49-year-old writer said he began to wonder what would happen if a renowned defense lawyer were accused of murdering his wife.

“I was suddenly fascinated by the idea of whether a Clarence Darrow figure or a barrister of that stature would call someone in,” he said, “or whether he would defend himself. And I’ve been fascinated ever since.”

Though his mother didn’t have an answer, “Beyond Reasonable Doubt”--Archer’s first produced play--provides his answer, and also explains who killed the barrister’s wife. Not least, it proves that Archer certainly was no fool for asking the question. Royalties from the play have come to “a million dollars,” he said.

Besides the London version in the West End, professional productions have also been staged in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. The Playhouse version--at the Moulton Theatre in Laguna Beach through April 8--is an amateur offering.

“We would love to have had a professional production in the States, but we haven’t had an offer,” Archer said.

Not that he was complaining. Next to his earnings from half a dozen blockbuster novels, theatrical royalties don’t figure nearly as strongly in his bank deposits.

“There’s no comparison,” Archer said.

“Kane and Abel,” his 1980 saga about old money and new Americans, has topped 250,000 hardback copies and 4 million in paperback. It was made into an eight-hour NBC miniseries. With “The Prodigal Daughter,” his 1982 tale about America’s first woman President, he became the first British writer to reach sales of a million copies in a single year. And “First Among Equals,” his 1984 chronicle about the House of Commons, ranked high on the New York Times bestseller list for 24 weeks. That novel, too, was made into a TV miniseries.

Though Archer is scarcely a favorite of the literary wags, he decided to try his hand at drama partly “because the critics have always said my books have ‘narrative drive.’ I suppose those two words made me think I could do a play.”

He also believes that audiences “are fed up with going to the theater and having some modern philosophical theories pushed down their throats.” And, he asserted, “the simple storytelling” of “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” accounts in large measure for its longevity on the London boards. “Give them a tale, I say.”

Further, Archer is himself an inveterate playgoer and even owns a West End theater--The Playhouse Theatre, where “Oscar Wilde” currently is running--along with a country estate and collections of more than 400 artworks (Renoir to Picasso, Pissarro to Van Gogh) and rare first editions (Dickens to Fitzgerald, Henry James to Hemingway).

For all his success, however, Archer is no stranger to failure. His second play, “Exclusive,” was a flop. It critiqued the newspaper world and ran for “only 4 1/2 months,” he said. “I’m afraid the press didn’t like it.”

That should have come as no surprise, given his own notorious run-in with The Star and The News of the World. In 1985, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher named Archer deputy chairman of her ruling Conservative Party. A year later, both British tabloids reported that he’d had an affair with a prostitute. The ensuing scandal forced him to resign.

Archer acknowledged paying the prostitute to leave the country, in the belief that she wanted to avoid publicity, but he denied having had sexual relations with her. And he obtained the largest libel award in British history from The Star--$800,000 in damages and $1.2 million in legal costs. The News of the World, in an out-of-court settlement, paid legal fees of $80,000 and gave him a public apology.

In fact, Archer took up writing after a previous political career was ruined by scandal a decade earlier. Famous for being the youngest member elected to the House of Commons at age 29, he quit five years later in 1974--the youngest to resign--when he lost $620,000 in an investment.

Unlike his 1976 best-selling novel, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less,” which told a tale of four men caught in a disastrous scam, “Exclusive” was not based on personal experience, Archer maintained.

Nor, of course, was “Beyond Reasonable Doubt.” He has been married to the same woman for 25 years. She is a former Cambridge University professor who happens to be alive and well and the mother of their two teen-age sons.

“The case in the play was entirely made up,” Archer said. “But I did get advice on how to murder your wife from a professor of pharmacology at Sheffield University, who is considered the finest medical witness (for court testimony) on poisoning.

“I went to him and said, ‘If I wanted to poison my wife, how would I do it?’ And he told me. He also told me that if I did do it, he was ready to stand in the witness box against me.”

The suggested poison fulfilled two criteria, Archer said: It had to do the fatal job in one night and it had to be difficult to trace chemically in the corpse. When the pharmacologist suggested such an agent, said Archer, “that’s what I used in the play.”

Meanwhile, murder and court drama are the furthest things from his mind at the moment.

“I’m in the middle of a major novel called ‘As the Crow Flies,’ ” he said. “When I say ‘major,’ I mean in size. It’s the length of ‘Kane and Abel,’ if not longer.

Archer has been working on the “Crow” saga, which he declined to describe further, for the last two years. So far he has written 250,000 words.

“I find writing very hard,” he said. “When I’m doing it, it put in a long day--7 to 9, 10 to 12, 3 to 5, 6 to 8. I really admire anyone who finds it easy.”

Had he thought of making his work less difficult by writing shorter books?

Archer considered the question and laughed. Unfortunately, he said, he is an obsessive rewriter: “I’d still do 10 redrafts.”

“Beyond Reasonable Doubt” opens tonight and runs through April 8 at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theatre at 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Curtain at 8 p.m. Tickets: $11-$14. Information: (714) 494-8022.