Self-identified as a "bit of a stroppy bugger" best-selling scribbler Frederick Forsyth is hanging up his Olivetti. What? "The world's getting nastier and I'm getting slower," he explains. Forsyth joined the RAF at 17, then Reuters and MI5. He returned broken from the Biafran war, a horror for which he will "never forgive" the British "corrupt and venal" establishment. Penniless in London, he bashed out his first thriller, The Day of the Jackal, in 35 days, and has never, as they say, looked back – book sales are 70 million and counting. His other lives as journalist and spook have greatly assisted the writing, though this tome is not his best. The Outsider, he says, is "memories, not an autobiography". There's an Irish link: Forsyth lived here in 1974, enjoying intimate suppers with the late Terry Keane, and paramour Charles Haughey, "an amusing rogue". Dismissed by the London literati as a lightweight, he quotes Liberace ("I'm absolutely devastated but I'm laughing all the way to the bank"). Terrific stuff. Still, the master of meticulous research probably shouldn't have shirked the hard slog of a proper autobiography. Even at 78.
