Frederick Forsyth

Author

• Born: August 25, 1938
• Place of Birth: Ashford, Kent, England

ENGLISH NOVELIST

Biography

Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is a well-known thriller writer. His father—also Frederick—was a furrier in the High Street of Ashford in the English county of Kent and had been a rubber tree planter in Asia. Forsyth’s parents were lifelong friends of the novelist H. E. Bates, author of The Darling Buds of May (1958), and his wife, Madge. As an only child, Forsyth had a fairly solitary childhood where he immersed himself in books. He devoured the works of such writers as G. A. Henty and John Buchan, as well as “The Saint” novels of Leslie Charteris. Forsyth was impressed with Ernest Hemingway’s nonfiction book on bullfighters, Death in the Afternoon (1932), to such an extent that at seventeen, he went to Spain and started practicing cape work. However, he never actually fought a bull.

Forsyth attended Tonbridge, a minor public school in Kent, where he excelled at modern languages but little else. After five months at Granada University in Spain, he returned to England and joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in May 1956 as a National Serviceman. For a while, he was the youngest fighter pilot in the force. His love of aircraft is clearly shown in his writing, such as in the novella The Shepherd (1975, a Christmastime ghost story) and in his editing of the anthology Great Flying Stories (1991).

In 1958, Forsyth joined the Eastern Daily Press, a newspaper in Norfolk, England, as a cub reporter. On the strength of his fluency in French, German, Spanish, and Russian, he joined the Reuters news agency in the autumn of 1961. He was posted to the Paris office as a foreign correspondent. This was a valuable time: In July 1962, while Forsyth was in France, Algeria gained its independence, and a month later, the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secret) made an attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle’s life. These events provided the springboard for Forsyth’s first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971).

Forsyth experienced the Cold War firsthand when Reuters transferred him behind the Iron Curtain to be their sole representative for East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. During this time, his room and telephone were bugged, and on one occasion, he was picked up by the Russian army. He was caught up in a real-life spy drama when an American captain defected but had second thoughts and accosted Forsyth in an ice cream bar, hoping he could help him get back to the West.

In 1965, Forsyth joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a reporter. A major turning point in his life was in July 1967, when Biafra declared its independence from Nigeria, and the BBC sent him to Biafra into a situation rapidly becoming a war. Although the reports he sent back described exactly what he saw, they were called biased, hysterical, and unreliable, and the BBC recalled Forsyth to London. Resigning, he returned to Biafra as a freelance reporter for Time magazine and the Evening Standard and Daily Express newspapers. His experiences were the subject of his first book, The Biafra Story (1969), a highly partisan account of a war in which more than a million people died, many of them starving children. Although it sold out within a week, it was not reprinted at the time—a fact attributed by some observers to political pressure. There have, however, been multiple subsequent editions.

Though Forsyth denied having any personal involvement in espionage for many years, in 2015, he revealed that while in Nigeria, he worked for MI6, the British intelligence agency. His experience in military intelligence would inform his spy novels, which many noted were particularly realistic.

When Forsyth finally returned to London, he had no job, prospects, or savings. To make some money, he wrote The Day of the Jackal in thirty-five days in 1970. It was turned down by several publishers who felt the novel would lack the tension needed in a thriller, as de Gaulle was still alive. Forsyth finally sold it to Hutchinson, which offered him a two-book contract. Once published, sales were initially slow but gradually developed momentum and surpassed both the publisher’s and author’s expectations, selling six million copies worldwide within three years. Forsyth won the 1971 Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for this book.

His idea for The Odessa File (1972) came from an article by Peter Terry in The Sunday Times newspaper, written while Forsyth was in East Germany in 1964-1965, researching the disappearance of certain Nazis at the end of World War II. As in The Day of The Jackal, some of the characters are based upon real people, and one consequence of the film version of The Odessa File was the identification and denouncement of Eduard Roschmann, a Nazi death camp commandant. Roschmann was arrested but died of a heart attack before going to trial. Also in this book is a reference to a hoard of Nazi gold that was exported to Zurich in 1944. Twenty-five years after publication, the Jewish World Congress discovered this passage and, after making inquiries, located gold valued at one billion British pounds.

Forsyth continued intertwining fact and fiction in his subsequent novels, such as The Fist of God, which uses the Gulf War as a backdrop and again shows his uncanny knack for finding or predicting unspoken truths. For example, it was not until after the publication of The Fist of God that it became known that British Special Air Service (SAS) troopers were in the Iraqi desert during the whole period of the Gulf War.

After The Dogs of War (1974) was published, Forsyth retired to southern Spain. He did not give up writing, but his next book was an illustrated novella, The Shepherd, which drew on his RAF experiences from 1957 when the story is set. Forsyth continued to publish novels throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. These include The Devil's Alternative (1979), Emeka (1982), a biography of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the President of Biafra, No Comebacks (1982), The Fourth Protocol (1984), The Negotiator (1989), and The Deceiver (1991). After the publication of Icon in 1996, the press reported that Forsyth was retiring from writing. This was a misstatement, as he wanted to write other types of books rather than thrillers. The Phantom of Manhattan (1999) is a considerable departure, as it is a sequel to Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1910). For this book, as well as all his others, Forsyth did considerable research and probably spent more time checking facts than he spent writing the book.

In 2001, he published The Veteran, a collection of stories initially available only on the Internet, though hard copies were made available later. Forsyth then returned to spy thrillers for his subsequent several novels, Avenger (2003), The Afghan (2006), The Cobra (2010), and The Kill List (2013). In 2015, he published an autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, and, in 2018, Forsyth published The Fox.

Forsyth married his wife, Carole, in 1973, and they have two sons, Frederick Stuart and Shane Michael. The couple divorced in 1998. Forsyth married his second wife, Sandy Molloy, in 1994. After declaring Molloy had forbidden him to travel to dangerous places, Forsyth announced his retirement from fiction writing.

Bibliography

Bear, Andrew. “The Faction-Packed Thriller: The Novels of Frederick Forsyth.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 4, 1983, pp. 130-48.

Biema, D. Van. “A Profile in Intrigue, Novelist Frederick Forsyth Is Back Home as Readers Observe His Protocol.” People Weekly, vol. 22, 1984, pp. 87-88.

Bloom, Bernard H. “In ’94 Forsyth Novel, Hard-Hitting Truth of Today.” Times Union, vol. 2, June 2007, p. A6.

“Frederick Forsyth Reveals MI6 Spying Past.” BBC, 30 Aug. 2015, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34101822. Accessed 11 July 2024.

“Frederick Forsyth, Thrilling In Real Life.” NPR, 17 Oct. 2015, www.npr.org/2015/10/17/449158992/frederick-forsyth-thrilling-in-real-life. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Forsyth, Frederick. The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue. New York: Putnam, 2015.

Forsyth, Frederick. "Frederick Forsyth, Thrilling in Real Life." Interview by Scott Simon. NPR Books. NPR, 17 Oct. 2015.

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Ibrahim, Youssef M. “At Lunch with Frederick Forsyth.” New York Times, vol. 9, Oct. 1996, p. C1.

Jones, Dudley. “Professionalism and Popular Fiction: The Novels of Arthur Hailey and Frederick Forsyth.” Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to le Carré. Edited by Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.

Levy, Paul. “Down on the Farm with Frederick Forsyth.” Wall Street Journal, vol. 18, Apr. 1989, p. 1.

Macdonald, Andrew F. “Frederick Forsyth.” St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers. 4th ed., Detroit: St. James, 1996.

Mims, Kevin. “Frederick Forsyth's Final Fictions.” something is going to happen, 22 Feb. 2024, somethingisgoingtohappen.net/2024/02/22/frederick-forsyths-final-fictions-by-kevin-mims. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003.