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How Freddie Forsyth wrote The Day Of The Jackal in 35 days - and based his novels on his life as an MI6 spy. But after passing away eight months after the death of his wife of 30 years, did he die of a broken heart?
His gripping thrillers made him one of Britain's most popular and successful writers. But the extraordinary life of Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86 after a brief illness, was every bit as exciting as the novels that made his name and earned him a fortune.
He turned his adventures as a journalist and as a Cold War spy with MI6 into a string of bestsellers. As an author he brought a meticulous reporter's eye for detail, transforming the thriller genre with a series of novels including The Day Of The Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs Of War.
The books – in all there were more than 25 – were a publishing phenomenon. He sold more than 75million copies in more than 30 languages.
The most iconic of the film adaptations was the 1973 movie The Day Of The Jackal, starring Edward Fox as the eponymous assassin hired to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. It was remade last year as a blockbuster Sky Atlantic TV series starring Eddie Redmayne.
Success brought Forsyth riches and honours, including a CBE in 1997 and the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger.
But while rightly proud of his writing triumphs, perhaps his greatest achievement was that of a husband who, late in life, found himself nursing his beloved wife Sandy after she developed an opioid addiction.
This was one domestic experience he did not put down on paper, but it was the most poignant of all. As he told the Daily Mail just a month after Sandy's death last October: 'What you see in my novels is violence and action and espionage and whatever. But that's not real life, is it?'
The 'real life' that intruded into the Forsyths' was something that Freddie – as he was universally known – was powerless to prevent. The couple had been together for 36 years, married for 30, and weathered all manner of storms – including the one where he lost millions to a fraudster.
For nearly four years Sandy, who was ten years his junior, had battled a dependency on painkillers, and he had been at her side as her organs shut down and her grip on life slipped away.
'Towards the very end, in the care home, she regarded her departure as a release and a relief,' Forsyth told the Mail's Jenny Johnston. 'She had no pain, and no lust for life any more. I, too, became resigned. So we would sit, and I would hold her hand and she would hold mine. We just talked.
'She knew she was waiting for the end. Life just ebbed away. Each sleep became a little longer. Each period of waking became a little shorter.
'On the last night, I sat at her bed until 1am holding her hand. Then she opened one eye and uttered one word: 'Go!'
'I came home. I didn't go to bed but sat in the armchair with the phone beside me. At 4.30am it rang and it was the care home. She had passed at 4am. I went back – it was only a ten-minute drive – and there she lay, staring upwards. I kissed her one last time.'
The woman he affectionately referred to as his CO (Commanding Officer) died just as The Day Of The Jackal was being reborn with Eddie Redmayne. The red-carpet premiere was only two days after his wife's passing and Freddie went alone. That he should have passed away just a few months after her will lead some to wonder if he died of a broken heart.
He might never have discovered fame and fortune as a writer at all but for a capricious RAF officer who ended his dream of being a fighter pilot.
Born in Ashford, Kent, in 1938, he flew fighter jets during his National Service. But when the senior officer told him there was no guarantee he would stay in the cockpit, he set out to see the world. He dealt with loneliness by immersing himself in adventure stories. Among his favourites was Ernest Hemingway's book on bullfighters, Death In The Afternoon. He was so captivated that – aged 17 – he went to Spain and started practising with a cape.
By now working for the Reuters news agency as a young reporter, he got a lucky break. 'The guy stationed in Paris got a heart murmur and had to come home,' Forsyth later recalled. 'A man stuck his head round the door of my office and said: 'Anyone here speak French?' Within days I was on the plane to Paris.' Forsyth also spoke German, Spanish and rudimentary Russian. At the fee-paying Tonbridge School, he had excelled in foreign languages. All were to be key in later stages of his career.
He was in France in 1961. The country was in turmoil with Right-wing extremists threatening to assassinate President de Gaulle after his offer of independence to colonial Algeria. 'We were all waiting for the mega-story, the moment when a sniper got him, through the forehead,' Forsyth later wrote.
Instead the young correspondent got the scoop on the security operation to protect de Gaulle from his bodyguards.
When a friend asked if an assassination would be successful, Forsyth said: 'It could be done, but only by an outsider. An assassin with no name, no face, no record, no history.'
Thus was the seed of an international bestseller sown.
Meanwhile, after a spell in Berlin in 1965 he joined the BBC, which sent him to Nigeria to cover the civil war in the Biafra region. When the fighting dragged on far longer than expected, Forsyth asked permission to stay and cover it, only to be told by the BBC: 'It is not our policy to cover this war.'
He quit his job and continued to cover the war as a freelance reporter. He later claimed that, while in Nigeria, he began working for MI6, a relationship that lasted for two decades. He also became friendly with a number of mercenaries, who taught him how to get a false passport, obtain a gun and break an enemy's neck.
All these tricks of the trade would be incorporated in The Day Of The Jackal, which he pounded out in his bedsit on an old typewriter in just 35 days.
After a string of rejections, one publisher risked a short print run and the book, described once as 'an assassin's manual', took off to become a dazzling global hit.
It wove together fact and fiction, often using the names of real individuals and events. The Jackal's forgery of a British passport, using the name of a dead child taken from a churchyard, was perfectly feasible in the days before electronic databases and cross-checking.
Forsyth followed up his success with The Odessa File, which drew on his Berlin days.
After separating from his first wife, former model Carole Cunningham, he was briefly linked to the actress Faye Dunaway before meeting Sandy who'd worked as PA to Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor. It was a love story to rival any of his gripping yarns.
