His first love was reporting. And while on the job in locations as diverse as Paris and Biafra, Frederick Forsythe who passed away recently dug out the nuggets of lives unknown which would later be the material of his best selling fiction.
Forsythe did not pen timeless pieces of literature. His works were fiction, pure and simple.
But they sold like hot cakes .It made Forsythe a very wealthy man and let him into high society on which his novels had ample takes.
His was a rags to riches story. For he was penniless in London when his debut novel The Day of the Jackal was published.
It was based on a imaginary plot to assasinate De Gaulle by some former French military officers after the decision to withdraw from Algeria. Incidentally, De Gaulle died of a ruptured aorta while playing Solitaire
From a once poor journalist Forsythe became a wealthy man. The sea change of his material status ushered in an image makeover.
He was portrayed as a typical upper class Englishman dolled up in a tweed jacket and club tie. It earned him a modelling assignment for Rolex watch in which the author makes a style statement pitching for the wrist watch synonymous with luxury and precision.
But it was a hard climb to the top;The Day of the Jackal was written in just 35 days. The novel which was to become a runaway bestseller was rejected by a host of publishers.
These publishers who felt that they knew better than the author pointed out that De Gaulle was not assasinated. And book will not sell, it was opined.
The readers proved them wrong. A superbly made cocktail of sub plots of brutality, lust, murder and betrayal spiced with the inner workings of French and English bureaucracy and a terrorist organisation, the book was an instant hit.
Frederick Forsythe had kicked off s new genre of writing. This was hurricane pace thrillers garnished with journalistic style details.
And the writing style still survives. There are many clones but none of them is a Forsythe.
Spies, assasins, mercenaries, Nazi war criminals, radical left wingers were the characters in his novels. All of them were embedded in geo- politics.
Forsythe’s attention to detail was infectious. The assembling of a gun and dissembling it come to readers almost visually as they go through The Day of the Jackal.
His subsequent works be it The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator to name a few are all marked by an eye for the detail. Forsythe wrote about a chaotic world in which his unconventional heroes sought to bring some order.
That is how his books brought realism through thrillers. Small wonder, they were instant hits.
‘I never intended to be a writer” Forsythe stated in his memoirs. “After all, the writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make s living at it, all the more so.”
He knew what he was talking about though his books sold more than 70 million copies.He maintained he wrote thrillers to make money.0
His forte was not drama. But he assembled facts with care in a way one asdembles a jigsaw puzzle while solving it.
But that does not in any way reduce his stature as an author. The writer of The Day of the Jackal needs no introduction.
Arguably not a storyteller of the class of Rudyard Kipling, a fellow countryman, Forsythe shared a commonality with the man who was more loyal to the crown than the king. An Englishman were often central characters of his novels, be it as heroes like “Cat” Shannon in The Dogs of War or the most memorable villains of all -Jackal.
