Anthony Horowitz's shock at his 'rave' review for a Jeffrey Archer "I was utterly hooked," Anthony Horowitz is quoted as saying on the back cover of Lord Archer's latest novel, The Sins of the Father. An absurdly enjoyable read. Archer is one of the best. Alas, as with so many things in the life of Jeffrey Archer, all is not quite as it seems. Horowitz, the creator of Alex Ryder who is now hard at work on the screenplay to the sequel to Tintin, says he was "shocked" to see the glowing endorsement, which was credited to The Daily Telegraph. Horowitz in fact used them not in a review of the book, but in an interview he had conducted with Archer for The Sunday Telegraph. They were part of his assessment of another Archer blockbuster, Only Time Will Tell, as the small print acknowledges. "Although I thought I was fairly even-handed at the time, careful editing by the publishers has turned my words into a rave," says Horowitz. It's a sad end to a 35-year career to find myself plastered over Archer's backside, so to speak, and it isn't what I had expected. Archer laughed it off when I bumped into him at a party at Daunt Books to launch Sandra Howard's new book, Ex-Wives. "That's just Anthony at his wittiest," Archer told me. No, we're friends, so I'll take it as a joke - yes, he will be joking. To be fair to Archer, Horowitz does concede in his article for The Sunday Telegraph that he did enjoy Only Time Will Tell, but with some notable qualifications that, one need hardly add, are not also reproduced on the back cover of Archer's new book. Horowitz wrote that he found the period details in the family saga "unconvincing," the dialogue "often questionable," and "from the title onwards, there is a reliance on clichés."