Frederick Forsyth, the author who turned his adventures as a journalist and work with MI6 into bestselling thrillers, has died after a brief illness aged 86.
Forsyth brought a reporter’s eye to his fiction, transforming the thriller genre with a series of novels including The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War.
Combining meticulous research with firecracker plots, he published more than 25 books that sold over 75 million copies around the world.
Born in Ashford, Kent in 1938, Forsyth flew fighter jets during his national service, before going to Paris to work for Reuters as a journalist.
After spending time in East Germany, he moved to the BBC and in 1967 he was sent to Nigeria to cover the Biafran war.
Despairing of the BBC’s reluctance to challenge the British government’s support of the Nigerian regime, Forsyth quit and returned to Biafra as a freelance reporter in 1968. There he helped to break the story of the famine which shocked the world, and began working for MI6.
Although Forsyth always denied he was a spy, in his 2015 autobiography, The Outsider, the author admitted he was an intelligence “asset” for more than 20 years.
Forsyth returned to the UK as the war came to an end in December 1969.
Desperate to make money, he “hit on the most no-hope-in-hell way of making some: write a novel. ”
The Day of the Jackal returned to Forsyth’s days in Paris, following an investigation to foil an assassin’s plot to kill De Gaulle. Packed full of operational details and putting fictional characters cheek by jowl with public figures, the novel brought a new realism to the thriller genre. It rapidly became a global bestseller, with a film adaptation released two years later.
Over the next five decades the bestsellers continued, with plots including nuclear weapons, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the cocaine trade and Islamic terrorism. An outspoken critic of Tony Blair, Forsyth was a staunch supporter of Brexit, becoming a patron of Brexit campaign group Better Off Out, and wrote of his scepticism of climate change in his Daily Express column.
Forsyth was never romantic about the art of fiction, repeatedly announcing his retirement and complaining that he had to force himself to write. “I am slightly mercenary,” he said. “I write for money.”
Forsyth moved to Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, in 1975 and lived in Ireland for a number of years, availing of the tax exemption introduced by former taoiseach Charles Haughey.
The writer said Haughey offered to make him a Senator if he agreed to stay in Ireland. Forsyth said his wife grew worried about their family’s safety during the Troubles and decided she wanted to move back to the United Kingdom.
Forsyth went to the taoiseach and said, “look, I’m sorry, but we wish to leave and go back”.
The writer said Haughey tried to persuade him to stay in Ireland.
“He even offered me a senatorship,” Forsyth told the Sean O’Rourke show on RTÉ 1. “He said, ‘I can’t offer you citizenship because your grandfather came from Youghal so you’re entitled to citizenship but I can offer you a senatorship?’”
