The End Comes for Forsyth

Mystery Fanfare alerts us that Frederick Forsyth, English author of The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and other popular works of espionage fiction, passed away yesterday at age 86. “Forsyth,” that blog explains, “was the master of the geopolitical thriller populated with spies, mercenaries, and political extremists. He wrote 24 books, including 14 novels, and sold more than 75 million copies.”

In his obituary for The Guardian, Mike Ripley recalls:

Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and “bashed out” The Day of the Jackal, he “never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist”. ...

Forsyth’s manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher’s sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle—an event that everyone knew did not happen.

The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly
forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal—an anonymous English assassin—almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader’s sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim.

It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers of America[’s] Edgar award for best first novel [in 1972], attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits—he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was “pathetic at money”.

Ripley remarks that while Forsyth “also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain’s armed forces, ... it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered.” The author’s final solo work was The Fox (2018), though he and fellow writer Tony Kent penned Revenge of Odessa, a sequel to The Odessa File, which is scheduled for UK publication in October, with an American edition due out in November.

READ MORE: “Frederick Forsyth: An Editor’s Remembrance,” by Neil Nyren (CrimeReads).