EFFICIENT. Neat. Abrasive. Polite. Rich. If you had to sum up the Rt Hon Jeffrey Archer, backbencher in the British House of Lords and best selling novelist, in one word, any of those would probably do; but "efficient" would do better than any other. He conducts interviews in the same sort of swift, functional staccato that characterises his prose style. He dislikes being interrupted, but doesn't waffle. He actually uses expressions like "good heavens!"

That's what he says when informed that The Irish Times is listening to his latest novel, The Fourth Estate, on audiobook. He seems pleased - it's another medium conquered, after all. But audiobooks are abridged, and that doesn't please him in the slightest. All that work - "every word by hand, felt tip pen" - and then they trim it back to fit on to two standard audio cassettes. Nothing I can do about that. It annoys me. I do have unabridged ones as well but they take 16 hours or something. But still, the figures are going up in audio. Right across the board, I mean, not just for me. And you have to face that with films, as well. When they made Kane And Abel they made 12 hours of it; but it could easily have taken 30 hours. They cut the war out. The war is the whole middle wadge of the book, and they just pretended it hadn't happened because they couldn't afford to do a war.

Did he object? Not him. He's far too much of a pragmatist. "I was in Hollywood last week. Do you know how much they spent on the film Twister? $68 million. If they spend $68 million filming your book, you say thank you very much'. You don't start telling them how to do it." If his trip to Hollywood pays off and The Fourth Estate is made into a movie, however, he has a few hints for the casting director.

"Obviously Anthony Hopkins could play Maxwell and Sam Neill could play Murdoch Maxwell? Murdoch? Doesn't he have the grace at least to refer to his two main characters by their fictional names, Richard Armstrong and Chris Townsend?

"Well, I don't kid myself," he says. The Fourth Estate, be explains, is a "novelography". Originally it began as a story about two rivals, any old rivals, in the publishing business. But how to compete with real life when real life was as large as Murdoch and Max well? Instead of beating them, he joined them. "Of course it required more research than I have ever done before on any book - a year not just of reading the 17 books that have been written on the two men, but also of dealing with all the people I know who knew them.

"I gave the 12th draft of the book to six people, three of whom knew Maxwell, three of whom knew Murdoch, and I said all I want to know is, have I captured them?' And the only criticism was that on Maxwell I hadn't gone far enough. So on the next draft I went that step further. If I'd written it as a novel nobody would have believed it. Everybody would have said; Jeffrey, nobody who runs one of the biggest empires in the world carries a powder puff in their pocket. Bob Maxwell carried a powder puff in his pocket."

ALL THIS research had to be combined with a working job in politics, and if there are those who say that being a backbencher in the House of Lords isn't exactly an onerous task, Jeffrey Archer isn't one of them. "I have a 92 per cent attendance record and a 94 per cent voting record. I'm not one of these members who never turns up, or enjoys poncing around the circuits calling himself Lord Archer. I'm a working peer. I disapprove of titles. I think there should be a second chamber, and I think it should be conducted properly, so I work."

Given his undimmed admiration for Margaret Thatcher one of the great statesmen the world has produced this century, and a woman into the bargain"

you might expect Jeffrey Archer to find life at Westminster somewhat dull these days.

Not a bit of it. "It's fascinating. The Tory Party at the moment is tearing itself apart - after 17 years in government they've become ill disciplined. The discipline is now on the Labour side; Blair has them all sitting in little corners with their hands in the air calling him `sir'."

Which is pretty much how the publishing world treats a bestselling author of Archer's magnitude. He is undoubtedly one of the great success stories of contemporary popular fiction and sufficiently revered to be considered an appropriate person to present the inaugural Impac Dublin International Literary Award to David Malouf, which is what brought him to Dublin on this occasion.

But that success, contrary to popular myth, didn't happen overnight. He began writing in 1974 following a disastrous business investment which left him in debt to the tune of £400,000 and forced a hasty exit from the House of Commons - but he did not begin writing in order to make money. "I've never said that. Others have said it on my behalf, and it is not true. I wrote my first book, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, as an exorcism and in order to do real work. It only sold 3,000 copies. Kane And Abel was an instant best seller, but I was in my seventh year of writing when I wrote Kane And Abel. The first book did nothing; the second sold 12,000 copies in hard; the third went straight to number one in England, America, everywhere. But it took seven years - not my idea of instant. What if you had instant coffee that took seven years?"

HE IS both miffed and amused by the constant stream of people who now approach him seeking advice on how to make a fortune from fiction. "A girl came to see me recently and said she wanted to write a best seller - I don't normally see them, but she was introduced to me by Cecil Parkinson, who's a serious man, sits in the House of Lords, said she was a very remarkable girl, all that. She had been in a plane crash and survived in an African jungle with a whole tribe surrounding her wanting to kill her.

"She said, rather casually, `how much money will I make?' And I said, `well, on a first book it would be pretty remarkable if you made 50,000 - and it would be very remarkable if you made a quarter of a million'. `Oh,' she said, `I already earn a quarter of a million a year. I'm not going to write a book, unless I get at least 10 million And she stormed out of the room.

So how does one go about writing a best seller, instant or otherwise? Discipline, of course. No excuses. Not even if you're invited, as the Archers were during what happens to be Jeffrey's next scheduled writing period, to dinner with Pavarotti. " `Out!' I said. Nothing I repeat, nothing gets in that section of time." Yes, but how do you begin? Are Jeffrey Archer's books plotted out in advance? He recoils in horror. "No, never. Some people put it up on walls, you know; chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. John Le Carre does that. I can't. I go `Once upon a time', and pray."