Frederick Forsyth's bestsellers drew on his work as a spy

Hindustan Times

12-06-2025

WHAT IS the best career choice for someone who needs to make money quickly? Joining an investment firm? The law? (Lawyers, though, usually need extensive and pricey qualifications.) Setting up a company is an option—but because most startups fail, success requires luck in addition to ingenuity. Reasonable people can disagree about precisely which field to enter, but they can all agree what not to do: write a novel. Most never get published; many published novels never get read; very few reach the bestseller list.
But when Frederick Forsyth returned from Africa—he had been covering the Biafran war in Nigeria as a journalist—he had no money or prospects. Against friends' advice, he decided to write a novel. Worse, it would be about Charles de Gaulle: the French general and president was unlikely to set publishers' hearts aflutter.
But he sat down at his old typewriter in his bedsit and (aspiring novelists may want to skip this bit) in just 35 days produced 'The Day of the Jackal' (1971). He had never written a word of fiction before. Yet the book's final version was, he claimed, precisely as he had written it. Neither he nor his editors changed a word, except for the original title, 'The Jackal', which he extended to avoid it being mistaken for 'a documentary about African wildlife'.
It followed a dogged French detective as he tried to stop de Gaulle from being assassinated by an English mercenary hired by aggrieved French veterans of the Algerian war. Still in print—and still a great read—54 years later, it has sold over 10m copies. The novel was turned into an excellent and faithful film starring Edward Fox and a dreadful one inexplicably starring Bruce Willis. It also inspired a recent TV series starring Eddie Redmayne.
The book was an unlikely success because the central question of any thriller—will the villain succeed?—had already been answered. De Gaulle had died of natural causes the year before the book's publication; readers knew the assassin failed before they read the first word. The book's thrill lay not in the 'whether' but the 'how'. As a journalist, Mr Forsyth had covered several assassination attempts on de Gaulle during the 1960s, and the book reflected his time in the field.
For added realism, he learned from a forger how to obtain a false passport and from a gunsmith how to make a rifle slender enough to hide inside a crutch. He understood the hierarchy of French security services—how they competed with and distrusted each other—and how an assassin could exploit de Gaulle's pride. He also understood the narrative appeal of the lone hero: Claude Lebel, his protagonist, had to battle French bureaucracy as vigorously as he hunted the Jackal.
Mr Forsyth would go on to write another 22 books that sold more than 65m copies. His novels were neither as haunted and gloomy as John le Carré's, as two-dimensional as Ian Fleming's, nor as parochial as Len Deighton's, but, like them, he was a novelist of the cold war. And, like le Carré, he was also a participant. Mr Forsyth spent three years as a pilot with the Royal Air Force, and late in life he revealed that he had worked for MI6, Britain's foreign-intelligence service, though he dismissively called his work 'errand-running'.
Aside from 'Jackal', his best books included 'The Odessa File' (1972), about a secret society that protects ex-Nazis; 'The Fourth Protocol' (1984), about espionage and British peacenik politics (Mr Forsyth was a staunch conservative); and 'The Dogs of War' (1974), about a group of mercenaries hired to foment a coup in a fictional west African country.
Some wondered whether truth and fiction overlapped in 'The Dogs of War'. According to the Sunday Times in 1972 Mr Forsyth spent $200,000, via an intermediary, to hire a boat and soldiers of fortune to depose the president of Equatorial Guinea. (Supposedly the aim was to create a new homeland for those who had been defeated in the Biafran war.) Spanish police intercepted and arrested the mercenaries, purportedly en route to carry out a coastal oil survey, in the Canary Islands—more than 4,000km from their target—after seeing one of them in camouflage on the boat's deck. Mr Forsyth described the reporting as 'imaginary fantasies'.
Mr Forsyth tried to retire from fiction in 2016, claiming he could no longer travel or come up with interesting things to say. But it was short-lived: despite not owning a computer, he published a novel about a hacker in 2018. A sequel to 'The Odessa File' will come out in the autumn. Not bad for a novelist who, at the height of his fame, said: 'I don't even like writing.'
Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.