That’s Entertainment

“The Eleventh Commandment” is Jeffrey Archer’s 10th novel. A former member of Parliament who is currently a member of the House of Lords, Archer has had an impressive and steady career as a writer of compulsively readable suspense novels. In addition to his novels, Archer has written three best-selling collections of short stories and two plays. His short stories, like his novels, are perhaps best characterized by the title of his 1988 collection, “A Twist in the Tale.” Archer specializes in the unexpected plot twist, the surprise ending.

Although he became a household name with 1974’s “Kane and Abel,” Archer’s natural storytelling instincts were clear from the memorable first paragraph of his first novel, 1972’s “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less”:

“Making a million legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little bit easier. Keeping a million when you have it is perhaps the most difficult of all. Henryk Metelski was one of the rare men who managed all three.”

At the financial heart of all of Archer’s thrillers is the thin line between multimillion-dollar success and overnight failure, the delicate high-wire act that renders international finance as much a matter of con artistry as it is of legal acumen. The story of four rich men who, having lost all of their money in a scam perpetrated by an international con artist, come together to plot an even more intricate revenge on their nemesis, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less” is a masterpiece of plotting.

With “Kane and Abel,” Archer established one of the primary themes of his epic novels--two men of widely divergent backgrounds become successful competitors on a global scale. In “The Fourth Estate,” as in “Kane and Abel,” one protagonist comes from a family of incredible wealth, the other from abject poverty. Each is driven by what might be called a shared raw ambition: one to prove himself despite his wealthy background, the other to prove himself in spite of his early deprivation. “The Fourth Estate” was clearly based on the true-life fortunes and failures of media moguls Rupert Murdoch and the late Robert Maxwell. In fact, it opens with both of their media empires about to fold, an episode based on real-life occurrences.

Keith Townsend, the Rupert Murdoch figure, has just learned he may lose his entire fortune because of the stubbornness of a single Midwestern bank--one of a consortium of banks whose loans have always kept him in business--which is now demanding payment on a $50-million loan rather than letting it “roll over” into another loan as banks usually do. Meanwhile, in London, Richard Armstrong (born Lubji Hoch) learns that his empire is about to collapse because of a Swiss bank’s foreclosing on a debt of precisely the same amount--$50 million. His despair leads him to call an airplane to fly him to his yacht off the French Riviera, where he stands poised to throw himself overboard--in the same way the real-life Robert Maxwell most likely did--when Archer flashes back to relate Armstrong’s and Townsend’s beginnings. The simple symmetrical contrivance that the fate of each man’s empire hinges on the same amount of money is a good example of the Archer touch.

Aside from tales of high finance and media moguls, Archer’s work has included novels of political intrigue. In 1984’s “First Among Equals,” three ambitious men compete throughout their careers to become prime minister of Britain. In 1993’s “Honor Among Thieves,” Saddam Hussein plots to steal the Declaration of Independence with the intent of humiliating the United States by burning it in public. Now, in “The Eleventh Commandment,” Archer returns to the subject of political assassination, a subject he first took up in his second novel, “Shall We Tell the President?”

(Interestingly, “Shall We Tell the President?” was originally the story of an assassination attempt against a President Ted Kennedy. Archer rewrote it in 1987, by which time Kennedy’s presidential chances had become clearly a thing of the past. In the new version, Archer imaginatively replaced Kennedy with Florentyna Kane, the heroine of the sequel to “Kane and Abel,” “The Prodigal Daughter.” Thus, the assassin’s target became the first woman president, and the novel was transformed from a possibly dated political thriller to the third in the sequence of Kane and Abel novels.)

‘The Eleventh Commandment,” Conner Fitzgerald is not your ordinary psychotic, trigger-happy CIA assassin. He is a dedicated and even romantic husband and father, sensitive enough to look the other way when his college-aged daughter shows signs of beginning an affair with a young man her age. Although he doesn’t carry with him the brooding existential baggage of a Le Carre protagonist, he does have a sense of honor and conscience. When asked to trail and possibly kill right-wing Russian presidential candidate Victor Zerimski, Fitzgerald refuses to take the assignment until he receives the go-ahead from the president himself. What he doesn’t know, though, is that his boss, longtime CIA director Helen Dexter, is setting him up and has access to computer technology that can duplicate the president’s voice over the telephone. Her plan? To have Fitzgerald captured and disappear in the bowels of the Soviet prison system in order to protect herself from blame for a previous covert assassination assignment she’d given Fitzgerald without the White House’s approval.

book’s title refers to the CIA directive: “Don’t get caught. But if you are, deny absolutely that you have anything to do with the CIA. Don’t worry--the Company will always take care of you.” It is the traditional erasure of all links between the CIA and its operatives that allows for Dexter to plan for Fitzgerald’s disappearance. Fortunately for Fitzgerald, though, a suspicious president has sent Chris Jackson, a former operative who owes his life to Fitzgerald, on his trail.

Archer isn’t one for dwelling on details that may sidestep his smooth, almost monotone narrative flow. That is both his strength and his weakness. While at all times genuinely involving and convincing, Archer is rarely gut-wrenching. When Fitzgerald is thrown into the Russian prison, there’s only a passing description of the wounds he receives and the pain he feels. Likewise, the prospect of remaining in prison and facing interrogation is presented with a casual authorial voice. We are never made privy to intricate inside workings of the CIA or other government organizations. Nor are we treated to technical arcana in the style of Tom Clancy.

Nevertheless, what Archer does not deliver in detail he makes up for with the ineffable gift of a natural storyteller, and he brings to the page a romance and a sentiment often missing in the genre. This is perhaps best represented in the character Sergei, a Dickensian Russian street urchin whom Jackson hires to help him trail Fitzgerald. In a mixture of the implausible and the touching, when the chips are down, it is young Sergei who provides Jackson access to the Russian Mafia--through his mother, who has a history of sexual affairs with men in high places. Can you say “Oliver Twist meets George Smiley”?

Richard Eder is on vacation.