When Jeffrey Archer rebuilt his life after ruin the first time, a craving for vengeance was often his protagonists' spur, driving the plot in his 1970s blockbusters Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less and Kane and Abel. It's taken a while for his second downfall to have a similar effect on his fiction; but now he's produced a novel that is (like Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption) a reworking of the most influential of all revenge stories, Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo.

Like Dumas's Edmond Dantès, East Ender Danny Cartwright is jailed as a result of a miscarriage of justice - in his case, he's wrongly convicted of killing his best friend Bernie, who was in fact stabbed to death by a barrister called Spencer Craig, whose friends confirmed his false account of the fatal fight.

Like Dantès, too, he's educated by a fellow prisoner, escapes and pretends to be an aristocrat; though in Archer's version, Danny adopts the identity of his cellmate and mentor Sir Nick Moncrieff, who was killed in the showers at Belmarsh. The reader is asked to believe that they look, sound and behave so alike that even people who knew Moncrieff well are fooled, accepting without question that the radically remodelled Danny is Nick and that it was the cockney boxer who died in jail.

Once out, Danny sets about securing Nick's £30m-plus inheritance, secretly assisting his loyal fiancée Beth, and entrapping Craig and his friends - an estate agent and an actor - in a potentially lucrative land-buying scheme. Eventually, he confronts them again in court.

This is a plot that allows the author to draw on his own experiences, including not just Belmarsh but also the law, West End theatre, auction houses and managing a vast fortune. There's a sense of personal investment absent from his thrillers about, say, art crime or US politics. It is, after all, a story of dramatic self-reinvention and living a lie by posing as a titled gentleman; and, piquantly, the key issue in court is whether the hero's enemies committed perjury.

Yet, as well as introducing the preposterous device of Danny impersonating Nick, the overlong middle section displays familiar weaknesses: cardboard characters lifted from John Buchan and parachuted unaltered into today's world; dialogue that never seems the result of actually listening to people (like the television soap, Archer appears oddly convinced that East Enders don't swear); leaden paragraphs made up of sentences all starting with “He”; scenes that are mystifyingly inert although clearly based on first-hand knowledge.

The courtroom chapters are first-rate, however, and suggest a future direction for the novelist. Artificial, old-fashioned, simply divided into goodies and baddies, this milieu suits him perfectly, and there's a gap for legal thrillers to complement John Mortimer's legal comedies. Archer's limitations mean he'll never become the latter-day Dumas he longs to be, but he's well placed to be the British John Grisham.

A Prison of Birth by Jeffrey Archer
Macmillan £18.99 pp530

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