While working for Reuters in East Berlin in 1964, Frederick Forsyth discovered a column of Russian tanks and missile carriers clattering around the streets in the dead of night and thought he was witnessing the start of World War Three.
He filed an immediate dispatch claiming that an invasion of the West was imminent, which led to panic as President Lyndon Johnson and the British prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, were woken for an emergency conference. It transpired that the Russians were rehearsing for a May Day parade.
As a correspondent for the BBC in 1967, Forsyth was posted to Biafra, which had declared independence from Nigeria and was in the grip of civil war. Caught in the crossfire of a gunfight, he saved the life of his fellow journalist Peter Sissons who had been shot in the legs. Forsyth was also working for MI6 gathering information, but for his troubles he quit the BBC after displeasing powerful people back home with reports that were perceived to highlight the Biafran case for independence.
By the start of the Seventies, Forsyth was in his early thirties, unemployed and heavily in debt. He at least had a fund of Boy’s Own-style experiences to draw on when he decided, without much hope of success, to write a thriller. He told The Times in 2018 that The Day of the Jackal was a “a way of getting me out of a jam. The craziest, most impractical way of trying to settle all my debts.”
The book took him 35 days to write and was turned down by four publishers. However, after meeting a director of Hutchinson at a party, Forsyth fabricated a reason for an appointment, took along a precis of his book, and stood over the man watching his expression change from boredom to interest.
The Day of the Jackal was published the same year (1971) and would sell millions of copies. So popular was this fictional account of an assassin’s attempt to kill the French president, Charles de Gaulle, that the country’s leading terrorist, Carlos, became known as “The Jackal”.
• Rereading: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth — as gripping now as it was 50 years ago
The Odessa File, a story of how Nazi war criminals were smuggled out of Germany to lead new lives, appeared a year later. The Dogs of War (1974), telling of life in military Africa, was a particularly popular addition to his output. It delighted Forsyth that when the mercenary Bob Denard launched a coup in the Comoros islands in 1978, The Dogs of War was his inspiration. “As his French mercenaries came up the beach … they carried a paperback edition of Les Chiens de Guerre so that they could constantly find out what they were supposed to do next,” Forsyth wrote in his entertaining memoir, The Outsider.
Forsyth’s writing technique was precise, punctual and well co-ordinated. Each novel took about 55 days to complete, with the author rising at 7am. Six hours and some 4,000 words later, he would leave his desk to wander his Hertfordshire farm, reflecting on the text before returning to correct it. Once completed, the top copy of his novel would be stored in a solicitor’s vault while the second was handed to his literary agent in an old plastic carrier bag. Editing was minimal and changes to the manuscript were few.
Born in Ashford, Kent, in 1938, Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was the only child of a trader who had been in rubber in Malaya, lost his money and come home to England, where he married a furrier’s daughter and had a shop selling musquash and sable.
After studying for O-levels at Tonbridge School, Forsyth journeyed to Granada, Spain, under the pretext of having received a scholarship to the university there. The truth was that he had a burning childhood ambition to wangle his way into the bullfighting world as a matador. The plan didn’t work out, but hanging around the ring with other aspirants and the old men who had “been gored once too often” gave him a fluency in colloquial Spanish.
Returning home he did his National Service with the RAF — “Just for something to do, somewhere to go until it was all over” — gaining his wings and becoming one of the youngest pilots in the service.
Then, as a cub reporter on the Eastern Daily Press, Forsyth lived in King’s Lynn, first above a pub and afterwards on a houseboat. He then “met a man in a pub”, which led to him joining Reuters at the age of 22, and he was in the newsroom in 1962 when a cry went up for a French speaker, a fluency of sorts Forsyth had acquired on another early adventure. Thus began an exotic life as a foreign correspondent: Paris led to East Berlin, which in turn took him to Prague, Budapest (“great women”) and Bonn (“never took to German wines nor liked their food”).
On one occasion, in the name of research, Forsyth posed as a South African arms dealer sitting in on a meeting of black-market arms traffickers in Hamburg. Unknown to the author, The Odessa File had been launched in Germany that week and his ruse was rumbled. After a telephone call to his hotel room warning him to leave the city, he hit the street running and did a “parachute roll” on to the first train out.
Success in the 1970s brought punitive taxation and Forsyth became a tax exile in Co Wicklow in Ireland, returning to the UK only in 1980 once the Tories, whom he greatly admired, had begun their tax reforms. The Devil’s Alternative (1979) and No Comebacks (1982) were both successful and were followed by The Fourth Protocol (1984), with its saloon-bar swipes at anything leftist, The Negotiator (1989), which anticipated a right-wing backlash against the new era of détente in the Soviet Union, and The Deceiver (1991), which revealed how British spymasters bugged the coffins of dead terrorists to listen to the mourners.
All his books were meticulously researched. “I went the extra mile to bring in things that would not have been necessary,” he said. “The minutiae of how a rifle works, how it is put together.”
Blessed with an aquiline nose, rumbling voice and a Biggles-style “what-ho” bonhomie, Forsyth was once named as the world’s most eligible bachelor by Playboy magazine. He married the Irish-born actress and model Carole Cunningham in 1973, with whom he had two sons. They were divorced in 1989. He subsequently married Sandy Molloy, a scriptwriter and former assistant to the film directors Nicolas Roeg and Ridley Scott and to Elizabeth Taylor. They lived on a 170-acre farm attached to his 26-bedroom Queen Anne manor house in Hertfordshire before moving to Buckinghamshire in 2010.
With an expensive divorce settlement to pay for, he was relieved to sign a then-record £9 million deal for two books with Bantam. He was also dealing with punitive demands from the Inland Revenue, and losses of £2.2 million when the Levitt Group investment empire, run by his friend Roger Levitt, collapsed at the end of 1990.
Luckily his books kept selling. The Fist of God (1994) gave a searing insight into the Gulf War, but after Icon (1996) Forsyth declared (though few believed him) that his novel-writing days were over. Nostalgic for the news-gathering era of his youth, he returned to the reformed Fleet Street of the 1990s, and was horrified by what he found, complaining of “limp-wristed graduates”: “The news floor is like a cathedral — calm, cloistered, reverent, the sepulchral hush broken only by the whisper of computer keys. Stunning birds walk up and down in skin-tight leggings and no one takes a blind bit of notice. The fellas all have degrees, of course.”
He contributed regular essays to the tabloids and mid-market titles on the principles of Conservative government and the dangers of European integration, even going so far as to compare Helmut Kohl of Germany’s obsession with the single currency with the “road to madness” that led to the Holocaust. In desperation at John Major’s government, he flirted with the Referendum Party, but he returned meekly to the Tory fold. He described his weekly column in the Daily Express as “an old codger sounding off from his pulpit”.
In later years he would write eight more novels and an autobiography. The Outsider was generally praised by critics for being as rollicking a read as any of his best fictional adventures. In one passage he says: “During the course of my life, I’ve barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau. The Stasi arrested me … and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent — well, her actions were a bit more intimate.”
Forsyth was acutely conscious that 80 per cent of his readers were male, and he played to the market shamelessly. “I’m doing for the menopausal male executive what Barbara Cartland does for the mum returning from the school gates.”
He was similarly honest, if direct, in his motives for writing: “There are four reasons people become writers. One, you have a message for humanity, which I don’t. Two you are a compulsive writer, and I am the reverse. I have to be dragged to the bloody typewriter. The third reason is fame and glamour. I couldn’t give a toss for either. The fourth reason, money, is where I come in.”
Frederick Forsyth, author and journalist, was born on August 25, 1938. He died after a short illness on June 9, 2025, aged 86
