Farewell to Frederick Forsyth, the master of the thriller
If Frederick Forsyth had not existed, you would have had to invent him. Yet no novelist could have come up with as convivial, swashbuckling and lively a character as the thriller writer, who has died at the age of 86. Many of his millions of admirers thought him almost immortal, and over the course of a half-century career – which began in earnest with the publication of The Day of the Jackal in 1971 and seldom slackened thereafter – Forsyth produced a series of bestsellers that sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.
After briefly serving as an RAF pilot, he went to work at Reuters and then as a BBC correspondent, where one of his assignments was to cover the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle in August 1962.
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