British novelist and journalist turned spy, Frederick Forsyth, died at the age of 89. The author of best-selling thrillers such as “The Day of the Jackal” and “The Dogs of War” was also the former correspondent for Reuters and the BBC. Forsyth was an informant for Britain’s MI6 foreign spy agency and made his name by using his experience as a reporter in Paris to pen the story of a failed assassination plot on Charles De Gaulle.
The best-seller book The Day of the Jackal, the story of an English assassin (played by Edward Fox in the film that later got made from the book) who is hired by French paramilitaries, angry at De Gaulle’s withdrawal from Algeria. The book was published in 1971 after Forsyth found himself broke in London. He wrote the book in just 35 days and after getting rejected by a host of publishers, who thought the story was fraud since De Gaulle was not assassinated in reality. But after the leader died in 1970 from a ruptured aorta while playing solitaire, the demand for the book became all the more widespread. Forsyth’s thriller book, with journalistic-style details and a rural plot of lust, betrayal, and murder, became an instant hit, and the one-time journalist became, well, the writer of fiction. The book later sold more than 75 million copies.
“I never intended to be a writer at all… After all, writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, even more so,” writes Frederick in his memoir The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.
Plots of Thriller Books
The fantastic plots in Frederick’s books almost rejoiced in the cynicism of an underworld of spies, criminals, hackers, and killers. But he was not limited to this only. Forsyth claimed to be a native French speaker by the age of 12 and a native German speaker by the age of 16. Due to exchanges, he added the Spanish language to his linguistics by the age of 18. Forsyth also learned to fly and did his national service in the Royal Air Force, where he flew fighters such as single-seater versions of the de Havilland Vampire.
It was in 1968 that Forsyth was approached by the secret intelligence services known as MI6 to inform on what was really going on in Biafra. By his own account, he would keep contacts with MI6 (which he mentioned as the Firm) for many years. Even his written works showed extensive knowledge of the world of spies and criminals. He even edited out bits of the book called The Fourth Protocol in 1984, so that militants would not know how to detonate an atomic bomb.
After his successful book The Day of the Jackal, Forsyth wrote The Odessa File in 1972. This was the story of a young German freelance journalist who tries to track down SS man Eduard Roschmann. Next stop, the journalist-turned-author wrote The Dogs of War in 1974, which is about a group of white mercenaries hired by a British mining magnate to kill the mad ruler of an African republic. (This was based on Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macías Nguema.) He replaced the character with a puppet.
Man With Many Traits
International daily New York Times comments on the writings of the 86-year-old journalist and says that his books were “pitched at the level of a suburban Saturday night movie audience (and that it was) informed with a kind of post-imperial condescension towards the black men.”
Books by Forsyth went on to become so influential that the Venezuelan military revolutionary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was dubbed ‘Carlos the Jackal’, based on his book The Day of the Jackal.
This was the life of a former BBC journalist, best-seller author, trained fighter, pilot with the Royal Air Force, and a spy. Frederick Forsyth, man with many trails—his legacy will continue to live, even after he has departed from the Earth.
