His own naggingly familiar plots have prompted claims of plagiarism. Yet now it’s Jeffrey Archer who is taking aim at copycats, calling Bollywood directors “a bunch of thieves” who steal his storylines.
The best-selling author was asked by the Indian news site DNA if his novels would make good Hollywood film adaptations.
“Forget Hollywood, just look at your Bollywood!” he replied. “These bunch of thieves have stolen several of my books without so much as a by-your-leave.”
Archer cited the 2011 Bollywood romcom, Ladies vs Ricky Bahl, starring Ranveer Singh, which he said was directly inspired by his 1976 book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. Archer’s story follows four men who plot to sting the conman who stole their money, while Singh played a conman targeting women who gets a taste of his own medicine.
The peer also pointed to the 1987 film Khudgarz, which he believes is a take-off of his 1979 best-seller, Kane and Abel.
The book is the story of two men born on the same day on opposite sides of the world, whose paths are destined to cross in the ruthless struggle to build a fortune.
Khudgarz stars veteran actors Jeetendra and Shatrughan Sinha as two men born on the same day who share a karmic destiny.
The former Conservative Party deputy chairman, found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice in 2001, had criticised Maneesh Sharma, the director of Ladies vs Ricky Bahl, in a blog: “It seems he just stole my book and has not paid me one penny in compensation. Bollywood needs to join the real world – too often authors’ works are stolen and the title and story changed so little that the critics pick it up immediately.”
Plagiarism is a sensitive subject for Archer, 74, whose CV has often appeared to merge fact with fiction.
The author Kathleen Burnett, who won a short-story competition he judged in 1983, later complained that aspects of her plot appeared in a book of Archer’s called Just Good Friends. She was told by his publishers that “there is no copyright in an idea”.
Critics noted a remarkable similarity between The Accused, in which Archer plays an actor accused of murder in one of his own plays, to the 1957 courtroom film Witness for the Prosecution, based on a short story, and later play, by Agatha Christie.
Archer is popular in India, claiming to have sold 50m novels there, and the plagiarism charge has not prevented him from offering his novels to Bollywood producers. But Archer said he was wary of his encounters with a “second-rate Bollywood idiot who goes around saying he’s a Bolly-wood star producer and then he is not! It’s true! Such has been my Indian experience many times.”
The Independent