This is getting confusing. It had long been suspected that fiction and reality were thoroughly mixed up in the records of Jeffrey Archer's real life.
This was convincingly detailed in Stranger Than Fiction, Michael Crick's superb whodunit biography of the businessman-politician-novelist last year. Now the blurring between what really happened and what didn't is occurring in Archer's fiction - if you can call it fiction.
The Fourth Estate is a thinly-disguised novelisation of the lives (and in one instance, death) of media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. The portraits are unmistakable, although they have respectively been given the names Keith Townsend and Richard Armstrong.
The book was a good idea. The two men have lived truly remarkable lives, rising to enormous wealth and influence at a tremendous speed. Murdoch parlayed a small newspaper holding in Australia into a global media empire. Maxwell was a penniless immigrant from Central Europe. They both skated in and out of controversy, and one of them - Maxwell - can be portrayed as a thief and a charlatan without fear of libel suits.
And Archer was definitely the man to write it. He is not a literary writer and is sneered at by the intelligentsia - but he's good at the 'boy's own adventure' stuff. He shows himself up when he writes short stories, not realising that the genre, with its heightened system of imagery and analogy, is closer to poetry than novel writing.
But these shortcomings fall away in the spacious confines of the blockbuster novel.