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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Frederick Forsyth interview: ‘I've always been a loner' – archive, 1973
9 June 1973 At the end of most journalistic rainbows stands Freddie Forsyth, hugging a large pot of gold. A pot spilling over almost without effort. It's a remarkable tale; one which (apart from confirming that there is a Father Christmas) tells you a lot about modern publishing and the demise of hoary, leather-bound gents making genteel fortunes between trips to the Reform Club. Operatively our story begins in January 1970. Forsyth, ex-Eastern Daily Press cub reporter, ex-RAF pilot, ex-Reuter man in Paris and Berlin, acrimonious ex-BBC correspondent in Biafra, was also becoming an ex-freelance. No commissions, dwindling cash. Thus, wanting other employment, he finally sat down in a series of hotel rooms and – through 35 days flat – wrote a thriller idly planned seven years before on the French reporting stint. It was called The Day of the Jackal, about a plot to kill de Gaulle. His agent sent it, with diminishing fervour, to four publishers who (perhaps because they were asleep) expressed polite disinterest. By August, Forsyth was getting despondent; as a last throw, he dispatched the manuscript to a French firm. They wrote back enthusiastically. He then sent that letter to Hutchinson, who asked for the book on Friday; on Monday he had a fat three-novel contract. Foreign editions of the Jackal now fill Forsyth's mantelpiece. Over five years it will make him a conservative £250,000. One throw, but not the last. A Jackal film, directed by Fred Zinnemann opens in London next week (after ecstatic American reviews). Novel two, The Odessa File, is an even bigger world bestseller, and will top another quarter-million with thousands to spare. Novel three, The Dogs of War, lies a chapter or so from completion, poised for a fresh killing next spring. Unless he casts his royalties to the winds, Forsyth, at 34, is rich for life after, perhaps, 100 days solid typing. And that, astonishingly enough, is precisely where he'll leave it. Three books and no more. The end of the rainbow. What comes next? Perhaps a little scriptwriting. Maybe some magazine reporting. Holidays at a newly purchased Spanish farmhouse. 'I've always been a loner.' So back to a lone, freelance, journalistic role using the name to get plum assignments and not caring a fig for cash attached because it's pleasantly irrelevant. Are the books, in any literary sense, good? Not very. Forsyth admits he writes them the way he does because that's the only way he can write. Straight narrative, packed with voluminous and sometimes excruciating technical detail (all meticulously researched, which is the true grind). Rather like reading, a 350-page Sunday Times Insight grope. The plotting – which is where he starts – often seems ropy (Odessa ends with a confrontation so stagey that Holmes and Moriarty, wrestling on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls, might pause and blush at the thought of it). Soggy globules of reportage verite litter and throttle action (our Nazi-chasing Odessa here goes to see Lord Russell of Liverpool amongst his rambling roses, just as Forsyth plus notebook did). Sometimes you feel nobody's read the typescript through before it sped to lucrative presses. There are few intricacies, no proper twists or subtleties. And yet, however crude or cumbersome, both (especially Jackal) are surprisingly effective. They exude a naive zest: coatings of detail, poured like thick chocolate sauce over a mingy scoop of vanilla ice, distract attention, criticism, distrust. Perhaps because he's never read Eric Ambler or Gavin Lyall or any of the other masters of the British thriller in any coordinated way, Forsyth is a true primitive, contributing something different and hugely marketable to a defined genre. His method takes a situation and location he knows intimately (by living and breathing it for months and years rather than a fortnight's impecunious research trip) then fitting a yarn to that morass of background. All the gossip, all the briefings he absorbed at the time and couldn't quite print. A few characters are fiction; most are lightly spiced fact. In the wake of Jackal, the French government held a small inquiry to find out who'd leaked their secret service structures. Of itself, this method explains best why he's quitting. The Dogs of War is about an African coup, an African mess (like Biafra), mercenaries, and big European businesses who pull the bloody strings. The Jackal was France, Odessa, Germany – Dogs, Biafra. That exhausts Forsyth's three spells of foreign experience. Unless he wrote a thriller about newspaper work in King's Lynn, he's finished. The only way of recharging would be to disappear in, say, South America for a couple of years – and even then he'd probably need a mainstream job providing a haphazard spray of facts and insights, piles of fuel to spark an idea. It all seems deceptively simple. You sit in his small flat over a dentist's surgery near Regent's Park and imbibe an everyday tale of gold-minting life. Forsyth isn't a Fleming exotic. His dad sold furs in Ashford, Kent. He doesn't care much for publicity bandwagons or cocktail promotions. His Foyles' literary lunch speech set brevity records. The car outside is unchanged by success. He likes jeans, Pernod, an occasional night at Tramps. His girlfriend rings to announce she's got flu. Frederick hunts for some aspirin to take round. A fluent, unflamboyant fellow. Not much interested in home politics. Loathes dictators (and blushes when you raise the Spanish farmhouse). Exposé journalism is what he cares about most; he had a high old time in France last year digging round the drug scene for a colour supplement and causing consternation among the Marseille connections. 'That was a 20,000 word spiel that caught a few people below the belt. It was nice, you know, to take a trip round the airfield again and not worry about money. I just let my agent negotiate the bread and got on with it.' Talk reporting and he comes alive. The mechanics of writing – 10 pages a day from eight to 12 in the morning make a 300-page book in 30 days flat – and it's mere iron discipline. Talk events for keener reaction. 'I mean, take Lonhro. If you'd written a novel using those facts last year everybody would have said come on, this is a bit bloody melodramatic. Do it in five years and they'll say: this was how it was.' The method, in short, won't be buried with Biafra. Nor can one quite see Forsyth vegetating for ever amid sun and cheap booze. He's like no other novelist because the business of novel-writing clearly interests him hardly at all; the business of bizarre, digging, living eclipses all else. He's not an author but a recognisable Fleet Street type – there are at least two on the Guardian – phlegmatically fearless, inquisitive, pragmatic, a bit solitary. 'A loner,' he says again. At a guess, I'd think there may be more thrillers five years or so hence, when there's more experience; but as things stand, The Dogs of War will end a weird interlude and Freddie will drift away into the wide, blue, perilous beyond – leaving behind a predictable cluster of imitators, an agent rolling in bread, and four exceedingly chagrined publishers. 'So the name fades. So what?'
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
My friend Frederick Forsyth was the most patriotic man I've ever met
A preposterous inversion of the natural order of things caused me to meet Freddie Forsyth more than 30 years ago. He wrote me a fan letter. Had I been a fan-letter writing type, I ought by then to have sent him several – notably about The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, two of the best thrillers of the 20th century that I had relished as a teenager in the 1970s. Yet it was he who wrote to me about an article of mine in The Spectator: I can't remember exactly what it was about, but I think it was an assault on the Major administration that was lurching towards the debacle of Black Wednesday in the autumn of 1992. That was Freddie all over. Although one of the world's greatest thriller writers, he was at heart always a journalist, and loved the society of hacks. For years he wrote a column for a national newspaper, and was brilliant at it; and he was brilliant precisely because he teemed with ideas, and expressed them with supreme articulacy. Freddie always had plenty to say because there was so much that motivated him, and annoyed him. He was one of the most patriotic men I ever knew. He believed intensely in our country, abhorred its apparent decline, and wanted to hold to account those he believed were responsible for it. Those feelings imbued almost every piece of journalism he wrote. We corresponded – letters in those days, in the age before email, his under the commanding header 'From The Desk of Frederick Forsyth' – for some months before we met. The letters and the writing paper seemed so fluent and so grand that I became even more in awe of Freddie than I had already been, and I viewed our eventual meeting with both excitement and apprehension. The summer after the fan letter, on a roasting hot day, he and his wife, Sandy, came over to our old farmhouse and sat in the garden and ate a long and boozy lunch. In those days they lived not far away, in their own much more upholstered farmhouse in rural Hertfordshire, and we started to see quite a lot of each other. It was not merely that he and I had a shared world view, and our wives got on famously: the Forsyths were the best imaginable company. Freddie had no side whatsoever, and his modesty was as conspicuous as his massive achievements. He was almost embarrassed when I asked him whether he would autograph my copies of his novels. Yet he inevitably exuded glamour however hard he tried not to. This was not least down to Sandy, who had been Elizabeth Taylor's assistant. One met all sorts of remarkable people when asked over to their house for Sunday lunches, all of which managed to last until dinner time. Celebrated actors were thick on the ground there – Nigel Hawthorne, Robert Powell and Barry Humphries were all close friends, as was Sally Burton, widow of the great actor Richard. I recall a long and revelatory conversation at the Forsyths's table with George Carman, the leading QC and libel lawyer, that was a definite education for me as a journalist. Two things were certain about a visit to the Forsyths: that you would come away having been spectacularly fed and watered, and richly entertained by the company. Yet Freddie, with his easy charm and complete lack of self-obsession, had had his setbacks. He was always devoid of self-pity, but told me ruefully about how he had been fleeced out of a fortune by Roger 'the Ferret' Levett, the notorious fraudster to whom he had entrusted his considerable earnings from his literary successes. The plan had been that Freddie would give up writing; but the Ferret ensured he had to carry on. I always felt, though the pain the Ferret had caused him was undeniably genuine, that in some way he was glad of the necessity to keep writing. That, again, was the old hack in him: once you have written for a living it is simply impossible to stop. Such was the demand for his work that he soon ensured his and Sandy's lives would not be damaged by the crime inflicted on them. With the calmness and determination typical of the heroes and anti-heroes of his fiction, he simply restored order. To his friends, the way he handled the outrage done to him was just another reason to admire him. And in time we realised there was even more to Freddie than met the eye. One of the most memorable episodes in our friendship was when I persuaded him to come up to Cambridge, about a decade ago, to speak to the University Intelligence Seminar about his association with MI6 in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cold War. Freddie was on a journalistic assignment to Prague; and allowed himself to become, to put it mildly, extremely friendly with a beautiful Czechoslovak woman working for the country's secret service. It didn't seem that Freddie got much out of her, though he ignored the finest journalistic tradition, and did not make his excuses and leave. The audience of immensely serious intelligence experts loved every second. Freddie's last years were overshadowed by Sandy's deteriorating health; although almost a decade his junior, she spent several years in a care home before her death last autumn, by which he was stricken. It was a genuine love match between the two of them, and although Freddie visited her regularly he was manifestly distressed by their forced separation. They had by then moved from Hertfordshire to Buckinghamshire; and he got into the habit of going to his village pub at lunchtimes; his favourite lunch was a drink and a pork pie. At Sandy's funeral he was heroically brave, and chatted animatedly to his friends in the pub after the service; we all knew what a blow he had suffered, but he appeared to be bearing it stoically. The rapid decline in his health was alarming, and it is almost as though after Sandy's death he lost the will to live. I only heard on Saturday that he was seriously ill; he could not, I was told, see anybody. Nonetheless his death was an inordinate shock. He was a great friend: but more than that, he was a great man and a landmark of our culture.
