We writers generally live dull and boring lives, tied to our desks painfully wresting words out of mundane experiences: not so Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86.
Freddie’s life was almost as exciting as the plots of one of his bestselling thrillers
Freddie’s life was almost as exciting as the plots of one of his bestselling thrillers, embracing as it did the triple careers of novelist, foreign correspondent, and spy. The other unusual thing about him compared to most other modern writers is that he was a convinced and outspoken small c conservative. Forsyth had a fully justified scorn for the inanities and dangers of the contemporary Left.
I first got to know Freddie around 2000, when I was trying to contact former members of the OAS, the French secret army of right-wing terrorists. That group’s near-miss attempts to assassinate president Charles de Gaulle for his betrayal of the cause of French Algeria formed the subject matter of Forsyth’s first, and best known, thriller: The Day of the Jackal.
I suspected, knowing Freddie’s political views and his admiration for military men, that he had a touch of sneaking sympathy for the OAS desperadoes and would know where to find them. I was correct. After he had put me in touch with the daughters of Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, the rocket scientist who organised the ambush of de Gaulle that opens Jackal, (and was shot by a firing squad for his pains), I got to know Forsyth. I soon developed an awed admiration for a man who became something of a hero to me.
Though we were of different generations and I could never have called this intensely private man a friend, we did have things in common that drew me to him: we were both only children. Both the sons of parents who had kept a shop in the same small market town: Ashford in Kent. This background in ‘trade’ had led to severe bullying at his public school, Tonbridge, to which he had won a scholarship.
He escaped from there to join the RAF as a pilot, leading to a lifelong love for flying. After that, he worked as a reporter for the East Anglian Daily Times and then joining Reuters, where he was posted to Paris, then Germany. Here he found plenty of material for both Jackal and his subsequent thriller, The Odessa File.
France in the early 1960s was embroiled in the hopeless and bloody attempt to cling on to its huge North African colony, Algeria, which had a population of a million Europeans, against a rebellion by the Arab nationalist FLN representing the majority population. Brought to power to crush the revolt and maintain French rule, de Gaulle instead opened talks with the FLN, which led to them taking over an independent Algeria and the mass flight of Algeria’s white population to France.
The OAS came close to both killing de Gaulle and overthrowing his regime in a military coup. For all his love for law and order and respect for authority, the romantic in Forsyth admired these men of violence and their devotion to a lost cause.
It was the same romantic streak and sympathy for the underdog that led Freddie to his second career as a spy. He only publicly revealed in his autobiography in 2015 what his admirers had long wondered about: that the authentic atmosphere and meticulous detail of his books was drawn from personal experience as a secret agent. While reporting for Reuters from West Germany at the height of the Cold War, Forsyth was approached by two English gentlemen who invited him for dinner. Over the meal they identified themselves as MI6 officers and asked Forsyth to cross the newly-erected Berlin wall and take a message to ‘friends’ in the communist East.
The patriot and the adventurer in Freddie didn’t hesitate: “Was I supposed to tell them to ‘naff off’?”. Using his cover as a journalist he operated as a courier in East Germany and other Communist states, keeping one step ahead of the Stasi and the KGB as he travelled back and forth across the Iron Curtain.
Forsyth’s third thriller, The Dogs of War about white mercenaries attempting to oust an African dictator, was also grounded in raw personal experience: this time of the tragic Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s. Forsyth had joined the BBC and was sent to Nigeria to cover the attempt by the Christian south-eastern portion of the country to break away from the Muslim-dominated north and set up the independent state of Biafra.
The BBC faithfully reflected the then-Labour government policy in backing the Nigerians, even when this led to mass starvation among the Biafrans. Forsyth, who passionately sided with Biafra, soon found himself at odds with the corporation. Forsyth had formed a close friendship with the charismatic Biafran leader, Emeka Ojukwu. His partisan reporting from the Biafran side inevitably led to a parting of the ways with the BBC.
Back in London and unemployed, he wrote his first book, The Biafra Story, a non-fiction account of the war. Seeking a lucrative means of earning a living, he holed up in a friend’s flat and began writing The Day of the Jackal. His former employers at the BBC, puzzled by his disappearance, sent a minion round to visit him in case he had committed suicide, only to find him hard at work bashing out the book on his old-fashioned typewriter. (Freddie was notoriously averse to modern technology, and used a typewriter rather than a computer to the very end).
A novel by an unknown author about an assassination attempt on a man who we know died of natural causes did not immediately find a publisher. But Forsyth persisted; on his 14th attempt, Jackal was accepted. Serialised in the London Evening Standard, it swiftly became a wildly successful bestseller.
Readers prized the gritty detail and breathtaking tension of Forsyth’s books. They were more realistic than the fantasy world of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, and the plots more simple and clear cut than the convoluted ambiguities of his left-wing rival John le Carre. For the next half century, Forsyth’s books continued to sell in spades.
Director Fred Zinnemann’s faithful translation of the Jackal to the silver screen starring Edward Fox as the suave hitman anti-hero, cemented Forsyth’s place as the best-read of contemporary thriller writers, his books selling 70 million copies worldwide in 30 languages. His two follow-up thrillers, including The Dogs of War were also made into popular movies. Forsyth became a millionaire with a luxury lifestyle to match.
Taking advantage of Ireland’s generous tax breaks for authors, Forsyth moved to a rural retreat there with his first wife Carrie and their two sons. But the Troubles were still in full spate. Fearing that a patriotic right-wing Englishman and his family might make a tempting target for the IRA, Freddie soon returned to his native land.
After his first marriage failed, Forsyth and his second wife Sandy settled in a bungalow in Buckinghamshire, leading a quiet domestic life only interrupted by his trips to trouble spots abroad to research his carefully plotted later thrillers like The Fourth Protocol, Icon and The Afghan. Unlike le Carre, Forsyth was unashamedly on the side of the western world in its successive struggles against Communism and later the threats of Islamism and a resurgent and hostile Russia.
An old-fashioned English gentlemen in the best sense, Forsyth continued to take a close interest in current affairs, writing a robustly right-wing weekly column in the Daily Express until 2023. Despite, or because of his experience in Europe, he was a committed Brexiteer. He disliked political correctness, and was notably lukewarm about a ‘progressive’ updated version of the Jackal screened last year starring Eddie Redmayne. (Although he cheerfully pocketed the royalty cheque). As a writer he was in the grand tradition of John Buchan and Geoffrey Household. He had no le Carre style pretensions to be a great novelist. Forsyth was happy to be a storyteller who sought simply to entertain. In that aim, he more than succeeded.