Profile of Frederick Forsyth on Famous Like Me

Frederick Forsyth (born August 25, 1938) is a British author and occasional political commentator. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Dogs of War, The Odessa File, Icon and The Fist of God.

Born in Ashford, Kent, Forsyth was educated at Tonbridge School. He later attended Granada University in Spain. At the age of 19, he became one of the youngest pilots ever in the Royal Air Force, where he served until 1958.

He then became a reporter, and spent three and a half years working at a small newspaper before joining Reuters in 1961. In 1965, he joined the BBC and was assistant diplomatic correspondent. From July to September 1967, he covered the Biafran War between Biafra and Nigeria.

In 1968, he left the BBC amid allegations that his reporting of the Biafran War was biased towards the Biafran cause, and that he had falsified elements of his reports, and returned to Biafra as a freelancer. In 1969, he wrote a book about the Biafran War called The Biafra Story.

Forsyth decided to write a novel using similar research techniques to those used in journalism. His first full length novel, The Day of the Jackal, was published in 1970 and became an international bestseller, and was later made into a movie with the same name. In this novel, the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète hires an assassin to kill Charles de Gaulle.

His second novel, The Odessa File, was published in 1972 and is about a reporter attempting to track down a network of ex-Nazis in modern Germany. Later this too was made into a movie with the same name but there were substantial adaptations. For example, the black jaguar with yellow streaks depicted in the story, itself a thrill designed to engross the reader was replaced by a mercedes.

In 1974, he wrote The Dogs of War, in which a mining executive hires a group of mercenaries to overthrow the government of an African country so that he can install a puppet regime that will allow him cheap access to its substantial mineral wealth. Following this came The Devil's Alternative in 1979, which was set in 1982 Russia. In this book, the Soviet Union faces a disastrous grain harvest and Ukrainian freedom fighters. In the end, a Norwegian oil tanker built in Japan, a Russian airliner hijacked to West Berlin and countless governments find themselves involved.

In 1982, No Comebacks was published, which was a collection of ten short stories. Some of these stories had been written earlier. The Fourth Protocol was published in 1984 and involves renegade elements within the Soviet Union attempting to plant a nuclear bomb near an American airbase in the UK. The result would be peace protesters demanding an end to the US airbases.

Forsyth's tenth release came in 1989, when he wrote The Negotiator, in which the President's son is kidnapped and one man's job is to negotiate the release. Two years later, in 1991, The Deceiver was published. It involved four separate short stories reviewing character Agent Sam McCready's career.

In 1994, Forsyth published The Fist of God. This is a historical novel about the first Gulf War. Next, in 1996, he published Icon, about the rise of the fascists in Russia.

In 2001, The Veteran was published, and was another collection of short stories. His latest book, Avenger, was published in September 2003, and is about a Canadian millionaire hiring a Vietnam veteran to bring his grandson's killer to the US.

Forsyth eschews psychological complexity in favour of meticulous plotting, based on detailed factual research. His books are full of information about the technical details of such subjects as money laundering, gun running and identity theft. His novels can read like investigative journalism in fictional guise. His moral vision is a harsh one: the world is made up of predators and prey, and only the strong survive. The novels he wrote in the 1970s are often regarded as his best work.

His research has caused headaches for governments. In The Day of the Jackal, he describes how the would-be assassin is able to get a new identity card. He visits a church, and looks for a tombstone of someone who was born nearly the same time he was, but died in infancy. He then obtains a birth certificate, and obtains the identity card. In the story, the government didn't cross check requests with a death registry. Unfortunately, this was actually government practice at the time, and Forsyth revealed this in his writings. In The Deceiver, he describes how a British agent bugs the corpse of an IRA member, so that when other IRA members whisper to the corpse (e.g., "We did great bombing that school five years ago"), the British secret service was able to take the information down. Journalists pressed the British government to ask if this had ever been done, and the British government was forced to admit that indeed it had.

Forsyth is a Eurosceptic Conservative. In 2003, he was awarded the "One of Us" Award from the Conservative Way Forward group for his services to the Conservative movement in Britain. He is also a patron of the Young Britons' Foundation. In 2005, he came out in opposition to Kenneth Clarke's candidacy for the leadership of The Conservative Party, calling Mr. Clarke's record in government "unrivaled; a record of failure which at every level has never been matched".

He is an occasional radio broadcaster on political issues, and has also written several op-ed pieces for newspapers throughout his career.

Bibliography

• The Biafra Story (1969)
• The Day of the Jackal (1971)
• The Odessa File (1972)
• The Dogs of War (1974)
• The Shepherd (1975)
• The Devil's Alternative (1979)
• No Comebacks (stories, 1983):
  1. "No Comebacks"
  2. "There are no Snakes in Ireland"
  3. "The Emperor"
  4. "There are Some Days..."
  5. "Money with Menaces"
  6. "Used in Evidence"
  7. "Privilege"
  8. "Duty"
  9. "A Careful Man"
  10. "Sharp Practice"
• Emeka (1982)
• The Fourth Protocol (1984)
• The Negotiator (1989)
• The Deceiver (1991)
• Great Flying Stories (1991) (ed)
• The Fist of God (1994)
• Icon (1996)
• The Phantom of Manhattan (1999)
• The Veteran (stories, 2001):
  1. "The Veteran"
  2. "The Miracle"
  3. "The Citizen"
  4. "The Art of the Matter"
  5. "Whispering Wind"
• Avenger (2003)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Frederick Forsyth