India, Oct. 7 -- There's a reason India gets my books before any other market, Jeffrey Archer once told an interviewer. Each time a book was published in the UK, a pirated edition would hit the roadside stalls and traffic signals of Delhi and Mumbai within days. And yet, the English peer didn't begrudge his Indian readers.

"Indians and I have always been natural friends," he later told the Press Trust of India. Between 2013 and 2016, his Clifton Chronicles books officially hit Indian bookshelves before they were published in the UK and the United States, in a marked deviation from traditional sales practice.

On October 6, his latest - and last - novel, Adam & Eve was released worldwide, and Archer had just spent Sunday signing books at ...