Long-playing novelists

There has been only exception to this urge to write and write and write: J D Salinger. He wrote just one highly successful novel, The Catcher in the Rye

Recently I was on two very long flights, around 15 hours in the air all told with four-hour breaks in-between. So I took along the two latest books by my favourite authors — Jeffery Archer and John le Carre. 

Both write the good versus evil sort of fiction. But while Mr Archer writes simple stories — upper-end Mills and Boon, if you like — Mr Le Carre’s stories are very complex. It’s only because they both write so well that they stand out from the crowd. 

So I was hugely looking forward to reading their new books. I started with Mr le