The lights are burning low in Snort Towers tonight, the skull and crossbones is flying at half-mast and house band Foghat are playing a slow blues. Big Jeff has gone to Sing Sing and we are all coping the best way we can.

How was it that old Horslips toon went? “The best and straightest arrow is the one that will range out of the archer’s view.” How true that all seems now – apart from the “best and straightest” bit, obviously.

Many people are dancing on the tombstone of Jeffrey Archer today but you won’t find any carousing up here in the fabled mansion on the hill. When one of the great ones goes down we are all the poorer for it. Not least those of us who like to give a few bob to charity, especially when it’s to help some peasant geezer in Kurdistan or some other such far-off place but requires of us only that we show up by limo at a nice champagne reception in Knightsbridge and try to stop giggling whenever a photographer hoves into view. Hell, sometimes we even remember to make the donation. Ah, happy times, happy times…

Transcendentally Crooked

Say what you like about Jeffrey Archer but the man had style. It’s not everyone who is so trancendentally crooked that he requires the help of two trained operatives to screw his pants on every morning and yet who can still walk out among the great and the good with creases as sharp as kitchen knives. Even Sam Snort has to doff the cap to that kind of chutzpah.

Now, the thought of the great man in prison fatigues being menaced by a large, tattooed person who wants to be called “Mother” is enough to put you off your latte. I’m not even sure that the experience of years of submission to Big Maggie will be sufficient to prepare him for the worst that Sing Sing will throw at him in the realm of frankly kinky inter-personal relationships in a confined space. Christ, it must even be worse than being in Foghat.

As I sit here by the dim glow of the computer, the very words “dim glow” make me wonder will we ever again work together on a book? Never the brightest bulb in the history of artificial illumination, Jeff always knew when to hand things over to the professionals – or at least until that unfortunate incident on the train station platform, sez you. But yes, now, at last, the truth can be revealed: Samuel J. Snort Esq, was the unseen hand behind the Archer pen.

So fucked after some business debacle that he could barely write a cheque let alone a sentence, his people contacted my people and, before you knew it, he was holed up in the guest bunker of Snort Towers as I lead him by the hand through the alien world of literary endeavour. We very quickly established our modus operandi. I would write the book – fuelled by 10 lines of king-hell crank and a couple of grapefruit, it usually took 72 hours of flat-out hacking to get from first page to last - and then Jeff, having sat quietly throughout the blitzkrieg, would take away the completed manuscript to begin the process of “editing”.

What this basically involved was the removal of all the interesting bits. The word “poontang” was the first to go, which had the instant effect of “editing” the work by a third. Next went “fuck”, “fucking”, “muthafucker”, “fuckarse”, “arsefuck”, “fuckwit” and “damn”. Eliminate also all references to drugs, masturbation, body piercing, the occult, bestiality, prodigious drinking, heavy music, violence against tree-huggers and such felicitous phrases as “her freshly spanked buttocks glowed like a pair of traffic light ‘stop’ signals” and, before you knew where you were, the book was now entirely bereft of anything of any literary, moral or spiritual value whatsoever. In short, Jeffrey Archer’s first novel was ready for publication.

Vodka Frenzy

Of course, Jeff being Jeff, he now had the brass neck to try to renegotiate the contract which we had signed in fresh blood, on a full moon night, in the throes of a massive vodka frenzy, in the crypt beneath Snort Towers. I wasn’t having any of it, of course. “Not fucking one motherfucking penny more, you worthless cocksucking leech, and not fucking one motherfucking penny less,” I negotiated. And there, with another little bit of editing, was the title of his first book.

That’s how it’s been for all these years but now, alas, no more. Making matters worse, is the unsavoury spectacle of all of Big Jeff’s cronies washing their hands of a man at whose bountiful table they feasted often and well.

Samuel J. Snort Esq is not that kind of man. For me, as for my other great fallen friend, CJH, loyalty is the greatest of all the human qualities. And, so, some day soon, before very long and in the not too distant future, I will visit poor Jeff in Sing Sing. But first things first. The fragrant Mary, now alone in the world, must be sorely in need of the warm, enfolding embrace of a protective friend, at this her darkest hour.

An’ ah thank ah know jest the mahn for the

job.

Your ever-lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq.