Frederick Forsyth (1938–2025)

Frederick McCarthy Forsyth, CBE, the acclaimed British thriller writer passed away on June 9th 2025, at the age of eighty six following a short illness. Forsyth lead an extraordinary life, best known as a highly successful novelist he was also a journalist and a former operative for British Intelligence.

He sold a staggering seventy five million books published in more than thirty languages. His first book, The Day of the Jackal (1971), the story of an hired assassin’s plot to kill the French President Charles de Gaulle, became an international bestseller winning the 1972 Edgar Award for Best Mystery. He followed that with the brilliant The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).

The Fourth Protocol (1984), joined both The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File as hugely popular film adaptations putting Forsyth in the same club as Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carrė who had managed the transition into global cinema success.

At the age of nineteen he was of the youngest pilots in the Royal Air Force, flying the de Havilland Vampire. He would go on to join Reuters as a European correspondent and then the BBC as a war correspondent, covering the bloody Nigerian Civil War in Biafra. His experience of the conflict inspired his first book, The Biafra Story (1969), a nonfiction account fuelled by his anger at the BBC for not wanting to promote the horrors of the war in more depth. In 2015, Forsyth revealed he had worked for MI6 for more than twenty years, a role that began during his time in Biafra.

Forsyth was meticulous in his writing process, he wrote his novels on a typewriter as a last stand against technology but above all it was his well-researched attention to detail that set his books apart from most. The combination of his journalistic background and time spent in the intelligence community gave his books an added dimension and depth whilst retaining a sense of real excitement.

In 1997 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his contributions to literature.

Forsyth lived a remarkable life, an engaging and deeply interesting man, his contribution to the espionage/thriller genre was immense.

See also:

The Day of the Jackal MK 3