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    Cat O' Nine Tales: And Other Stories
    Cat O' Nine Tales: And Other Stories
    Cat O' Nine Tales: And Other Stories
    Audiobook6 hours

    Cat O' Nine Tales: And Other Stories

    Written by Jeffrey Archer

    Narrated by Anton Lesser

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    About this audiobook

    Cat O'Nine Tales is the fifth collection of irresistible short stories from the master storyteller and bestselling author Jeffrey Archer.

    Ingeniously plotted, with richly drawn characters and Archer's trademark of deliciously unexpected conclusions, some of these thirteen stories were inspired by the two years Jeffrey Archer spent in prison, including the story of a company chairman who tries to poison his wife while on a trip to St Petersburg—with unexpected consequences.

    The Red King is a tale about a con man who discovers that an English Lord requires one more chess piece to complete a set that would be worth a fortune. In another tale of deception, The Commissioner, a Bombay con artist ends up in the morgue, after he uses the police chief as bait in his latest scam. The Perfect Murder reveals how a convict manages to remove an old enemy while he's locked up in jail, and then set up two prison officers as his alibi. In Charity Begins at Home, an accountant realizes he has achieved nothing in his life, and sets out to make a fortune before he retires.

    And then there is Archer's favorite, In the Eye of the Beholder, where a handsome star athlete falls in love with a three-hundred-pound woman...who happens to be the ninth richest woman in Italy.

    Jeffrey Archer is the only author to have topped international bestseller lists with his fiction, non-fiction, and his short stories. Cat O'Nine Tales is Archer at his best: witty, sad, surprising, and unforgettable.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateJun 12, 2007
    ISBN9781427200488
    Author

    Jeffrey Archer

    Jeffrey Archer, whose novels and short stories include the Clifton Chronicles, Kane and Abel and Cat O’ Nine Tales, is one of the world’s favourite storytellers and has topped the bestseller lists around the world in a career spanning four decades. His work has been sold in 97 countries and in more than 37 languages. He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction, short stories and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries). Jeffrey is also an art collector and amateur auctioneer, and has raised more than £50m for different charities over the years. A member of the House of Lords for over a quarter of a century, the author is married to Dame Mary Archer, and they have two sons, two granddaughters and two grandsons.

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    Reviews for Cat O' Nine Tales

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    • 4/5
      12 short stories, mostly set in England, with a few out of there (India, Russia (although the characters in this one are English so not quite sure if it counts as an oversea one), Greece, Italy, etc). Most of the stories are based on real crimes which Archer had been told about while he was in jail.Archer's stories (and novels) had never been popular for the big twists - there are some small ones but as a whole, it's the narrative and the story that matters, not the twists and the surprises. But even in this style, the twists pay off. Some of the stories are really entertaining, some are almost absurd ("Don't Drink The Water"), some seem to be exposing some strange things happening in Her Majesty's prisons ("The Alibi") (and when one of those stories is there, there is a short note at the end about what is happening to the inmate in question). And through the whole collection, there had been one main line - crime does not pay off (probably with the exception of "The Red King" which was probably the funniest story from the lot). Definitely not as strong as some of his novels but a pretty solid collection - 4 stars out of 5 for it.
    • 4/5
      Archer uses the prison theme through this collection of short stories, all of them based on fact. He has a real talent for story telling : simple, light-hearted and even mischievous, he draws the reader in. A fun, light read which convinces that crime does not pay.
    • 4/5
      This book is a collection of twelve short stories, nine of which are ideas he picked up while in prison.The stories are quite enlightening, insightful and engaging. All twelve of them. I enjoyed reading all of them immensely.My favourites are The Man Who Robbed His Own Post Office, Don't Drink The Water, It Can't Be October Already (which has a sad postscript at the end), The Red King (with the most cunning thief, I must say!), The Wisdom of Solomon, Charity Begins At Home and The Alibi (patience is a virtue).
    • 3/5
      Jeffrey Archer, in this book and several similar collections before it, works in a literary form that is virtually extinct elsewhere: the non-genre, non-literary short story. He writes the kind of tale that filled the pages of now-extinct “slick” general-circulation magazines like The Saturday Evening Post at the middle of the last century: stories whose linear plots involve essentially ordinary characters in events that are extraordinary but not fantastic. They have beginnings, middles, and endings . . . the latter often, in the turn of-the-century style of H. H. “Saki” Munro and William Sidney “O. Henry” Porter, involve twists.Cat O’ Nine tales differs slightly from its predecessors in that it has a theme: nine of the twelve stories are based on tales he heard while serving time in prison, and thus (to one degree or another) involve crime or the law. That constraint limits Archer’s range of subjects somewhat, and -- because the backbones of the plots come pre-made -- sometimes pushes him away from the kinds of tales where he’s most at home. Pathos (“It Can’t Be October Already”) and the absurd (“Don’t Drink the Water”) don’t suit his style nearly as well as complicated tales of mind games and deception (“The Wisdom of Solomon” and “The Red King”). It also creates, in several stories (particularly “The Man who Robbed His Own Post Office”), unexpected hurdles for American readers not familiar with the specifics of British culture on which they turn.Archer’s literary craftsmanship asserts itself throughout the book, however, ensuring that the stories are never less than readable. The consistency of his work comes through as well, ensuring that readers who liked his previous collections, will probably like this one -- a bit more or less, perhaps, depending on their taste for genteel tales of crime and punishment.