Frederick Forsyth – the reporter who turned his foreign adventures into best-selling thrillers

The Irish Sun

4 hours ago

FROM RAF pilot to journalist with romantic links to a Hollywood star, Frederick Forsyth loved to travel the world and get up to mischief.
It is no wonder the dashing former MI6 agent used his adventures to help him write more than 25 books, selling 75million copies in a half-century long literary career.
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Frederick Forsyth at his typewriter in the Seventies
Credit: Getty
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1973 film The Day of the Jackal with Edward Fox
Credit: Alamy
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Frederick collecting his CBE with wife Sandy in 1997
Credit: PA:Press Association
It was during his time as a journalist that The Day Of The Jackal, about an assassination attempt on then French president Charles de Gaulle, was formulated.
And a year-long assignment in Soviet East
Last year, the twice-married author, who was also romantically linked to Hollywood star Faye Dunaway told The Sun: 'I got a lot of attention from the secret police, the Stasi. I was followed all over the bloody place.
'I thought the only way to survive is to take the mickey. They had no sense of humour, so I would do stupid things.
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'Too stupid'
'I knew my apartment was bugged, so I would go into the bedroom and have an extremely passionate orgy with a non-existent female.
'Knowing every word was being recorded I used two or three voices and then there'd be a knock on the door. 'Mein Herr, your gas is leaking'.
'They would search the flat and discover I had an invisible mistress.'
Forsyth, who died yesterday morning after a short illness, was born in Ashford in Kent in 1938.
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His mum ran a dress shop and his dad was a furrier.
He attended a private school nearby in Tonbridge and wanted to leave home aged 17 to become a bullfighter in Spain.
Trailer for new adaptation of The Day of the Jackal starring Eddie Redmayne
Instead Frederick had to do national service and became one of the youngest RAF fighter pilots aged 19.
Frustrated that he wasn't getting to travel the globe as much as he'd like, he joined the Eastern Daily Press as a trainee reporter.
From there he went to Reuters, where his ability to speak French saw him posted in Paris during an anti-de Gaulle campaign by a far-right paramilitary organisation called the OAS.
He said: 'There definitely was an OAS trying to assassinate President de Gaulle and I was there covering it as a Reuters reporter in 1962 to '63.
'I thought to myself that they probably would fail because they were so penetrated by French counter intelligence that it was hardly possible for four of them to sit around a table.'
From there he went to East
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Spy author Frederick talking to The Sun last year
Credit: Arthur Edwards / The Sun
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Former pilot Frederick in his RAF uniform aged 19
Credit: Arthur Edwards / The Sun
He said: 'I was once picked up in Magdeburg by the Stasi and interrogated through the night.
'I was like the PG Wodehouse character Bertie Wooster.
'Eager to please, helpless, hopeless, hapless and therefore harmless.
'Having shouted at me all night, they took me down a long corridor to a door.
'I didn't know whether it was the execution chamber or what it could be.
'Turned out to be the car park.
'They were chucking me out.
'As I was getting in the car, I heard one of them say 'He's too stupid to be an agent'.'
Frederick then covered the civil war between Biafra and Nigeria for the BBC but his contract was not renewed after six months.
Every friend I had told me very, very clearly that I was absolutely insane.
Frederick Forsyth
He wanted to go back to tell the world what was going on because up to two million people died of starvation in the conflict.
Finding himself unemployed at Christmas 1969, he set about writing The Day Of The Jackal.
Freddie said: 'I was skint, out of a job and I thought I'll write a novel.
'Every friend I had told me very, very clearly that I was absolutely insane.'
He turned out 350 pages in 35 days, not a word of which was changed on publication.
Although he said he took the sex scene out because he didn't think he had written it well.
The book proved to be a massive hit, with the publishers offering Frederick a then princely £75,000 for the rights forever.
He regretted accepting the deal because the book sold 12million copies and was turned into two films and a ten-part Sky drama starring Eddie Redmayne.
It probably would have earned him a million pounds in royalties.
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Frederick at home in Herts in 1971
Credit: Getty
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Eddie Redmayne in a modern adaptation of The Day of the Jackal
Credit: Carnival Film & Television Limited
There were plenty more novels including The Odessa File, The Dogs Of War and The Fourth Protocol.
Frederick claimed his romantic life was untroubled even though he divorced his first wife Carole in 1989. Shortly afterwards he said: 'We have both been very determined indeed to keep it civilised.'
Then, in 1994, he married one of his fans Sandy Molloy, who he was with until she died in October 2024.
Frederick had to keep writing because he was swindled out of £2.2million by dodgy financial adviser Roger Levitt in 1990 and his final novel Revenge Of Odessa is due to be published later this year.
'Extraordinary life'
In 1997 he was made a CBE for services to literature.
His friend David Davis, the Conservative MP, paid a warm tribute, saying: 'Freddie believed in honour and patriotism and courage and directness and straightforwardness.
'We haven't got many authors like him and we will miss him greatly.
'James Bond was total fantasy but everything that Freddie wrote about was based in a real world.'
The author, who died at home in Buckinghamshire, left behind two sons Stuart and Shane from his first marriage.
His agent Jonathan Lloyd said: 'We mourn the passing of one of the world's greatest thriller writers.
'Only a few weeks ago I sat with him as we watched a new and moving documentary of his life, In My Own Words, to be released later this year on BBC One and was reminded of an extraordinary life, well lived.
'He will be greatly missed by his family, his friends, all of us at Curtis Brown and, of course, his millions of fans around the world.
'Though his books will, of course, live on forever.'