Frederick Forsyth, the author who turned his adventures as a journalist and work with MI6 into bestselling thrillers, has died after a brief illness aged 86.
Forsyth brought a reporter’s eye to his fiction, transforming the thriller genre with a series of novels including The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War. Combining meticulous research with firecracker plots, he published a series of novels that sold more than 75m copies around the world, and won him honours including a CBE in 1997 and the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger award.
Born in Ashford, Kent in 1938, Forsyth flew fighter jets during his national service, but when the Royal Air Force couldn’t guarantee he’d stay in the cockpit he set out to see the world. While working for Reuters as a journalist, he got a lucky break. “The guy stationed in Paris got a heart murmur and had to come home,” he told the Big Issue. “A man stuck his head around the door of my office and said, ‘Anyone here speak French?’ Within days I was on the plane to Paris.”
Paris in 1961 was in turmoil, with rightwing militants threatening to assassinate Charles de Gaulle after his offer of independence to Algeria. “We were all waiting for the mega-story,” the author recalled in the Express, “the moment when a sniper got him through the forehead.” Forsyth got the inside track on the security operation from De Gaulle’s bodyguards and when a friend asked if an assassination would be successful, the writer shook his head. “It could be done,” Forsyth replied, “but only by an outsider. An assassin with no name, no face, no record, no dossier. And a professional.” The seed of an international bestseller was sown.
After spending time in East Germany, Forsyth moved to the BBC and in 1967 he was sent to Nigeria to cover the Biafran war. He arrived in the newly independent eastern region three days after the federal government’s invasion, having been told that the army would suppress the rebellion in a couple of weeks.
“My brief was to report the all-conquering march of the Nigerian army,” Forsyth recalled. “It did not happen. Naively, I filed this. When my report was broadcast our high commissioner complained to the CRO in London, who passed it on to the BBC – which accused me of pro-rebel bias and recalled me to London.”
Despairing of the BBC’s reluctance to challenge the British government’s support of the Nigerian regime, Forsyth quit and returned to Biafra as a freelance reporter in 1968. There he helped to break the story of the famine which shocked the world, and began working for MI6. Although Forsyth always denied he was a spy, in his 2015 autobiography, The Outsider, the author admitted he was an intelligence “asset” for more than 20 years. “There was nothing weird about it,” he told a Guardian Live audience, “it was the cold war. An awful lot of the strength of British intelligence came from the number of volunteers. A businessman might be going to a trade fair in a difficult-to-enter city and he’d be approached, quite gently, with a courteous, ‘If you would be so kind as to accept an envelope under your hotel door and bring it home …’ so that was what I did. I ran errands.”
Forsyth returned to the UK as the war came to an end in December 1969, finding himself with “no job, no prospects, no flat, no car, no savings”. Desperate to make money, he “hit on the most no-hope-in-hell way of making some: write a novel. I just sat down and wrote about the invisible assassin with no name. I knew my material; I had walked every inch of it. I wrote night and day for 35 days.”
The Day of the Jackal returned to Forsyth’s days in Paris, following an investigation to foil an assassin’s plot to kill De Gaulle. Packed full of operational details and putting fictional characters cheek by jowl with public figures, the novel brought a new realism to the thriller genre. The Guardian hailed it in 1971 as a “chilling, superbly researched story”, asking “Or is it fiction?” It rapidly became a word-of-mouth hit and a global bestseller, with a film adaptation released two years later.
In 1972’s The Odessa File, a young German reporter goes in search of the Nazi war criminal Eduard Roschmann and stumbles on an organisation defending high-ranking members of the SS. The New York Times was scathing, suggesting Forsyth had “borrowed painful, live history in order to spring a few quick thrills”, but it quickly became a bestseller. Forsyth also claimed that the novel helped to identify Roschmann in real life. “They made it into a film, which was screened in a little fleapit cinema south of Buenos Aires,” Forsyth told the Telegraph, “where a man stood up and said, ‘I know that man, he lives down the street from me,’ and denounced him. He decided to make a run for it to Paraguay and died of a heart attack on the river crossing. They buried him in an unmarked gravel pit. I hope they tossed a copy of the book in on top of him.”
Forsyth began to develop a method, researching a novel for six months then writing it quickly. His commitment to detail was not without danger: in 1974, the author was investigating the illegal arms trade in Hamburg for The Dogs of War, the story of a group of mercenaries who plot a coup in a fictional African republic. When an arms dealer recognised his portrait in a bookshop window, Forsyth was warned he had 80 seconds to leave his hotel. Grabbing his money and passport, he ran to the station and jumped on to a train as it pulled away.
Over the next five decades the bestsellers continued, with plots including nuclear weapons, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the cocaine trade and Islamic terrorism. An outspoken critic of Tony Blair, Forsyth was a staunch supporter of Brexit, becoming a patron of Brexit campaign group Better Off Out, and wrote of his scepticism of climate change in his Daily Express column.
Forsyth was never romantic about the art of fiction, repeatedly announcing his retirement and complaining that he had to force himself to write. “I am slightly mercenary,” he said. “I write for money.”
But Forsyth kept returning to his typewriter and over his lifetime wrote more than 25 books, that have sold over 75 million copies.
Speaking to the Times at the launch of his 2018 novel The Fox, the writer declared once more that it would be his last. But even as Forsyth insisted “the interest has gone”, there was still a hint of unfinished business. “I’ve got three unused typewriters in a cupboard at home,” he said, “enough to see me out.”
Jonathan Lloyd, Forsyth’s agent, said he last saw the writer a few weeks ago to watch a forthcoming BBC documentary of his life. Lloyd said he “was reminded of an extraordinary life, well lived.”
“Having long held The Day of the Jackal as the blueprint of the modern thriller, I was honoured to become his editor for Avenger in 2002 and have remained so ever since,” said Bill Scott-Kerr, Forsyth’s publisher. “Working with Freddie has been one of the great pleasures of my professional life,” he added. “He leaves behind a peerless legacy which will continue to excite and entertain for years to come.”