Forsyth reported on his early activities as a journalist. His early career was spent covering French affairs and the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle. He had never been to Africa until reporting on the Nigerian Civil War between Biafra and Nigeria as a BBC correspondent.[6] He was there for the first six months of 1967, but few expected the war to last very long considering the poor weaponry and preparation of the Biafrans when compared to the British-armed Nigerians. After his six months were over, however, Forsyth — eager to carry on reporting — approached the BBC to ask if he could have more time there. He noted their response:
I was told quite bluntly, then, "it is not our policy to cover this war". This was a period when the Vietnam War was front-page headlines almost every day, regarded broadly as an American cock-up, and this particularly British cock-up in Nigeria was not going to be covered. I smelt news management. I don't like news management. So I made a private vow to myself: "you may, gentlemen, not be covering it, but I'm going to cover it". So I quit and flew out there, and stayed there for most of the next two years.
He thus returned to Biafra as a freelance reporter, writing his first book, The Biafra Story, in 1969.[7]
In August 2015 Forsyth revealed that in Biafra he was an informant for MI6, a relationship that continued for 20 years. According to Forsyth, he was not paid.[8]
He is an occasional radio broadcaster on political issues and has also written for newspapers throughout his career, including a weekly page in the Daily Express. In 2003, he criticised "gay-bashers in the churches" in The Guardian newspaper.[9] He has narrated several documentaries, including Jesus Christ Airlines, Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle and I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal.
According to Forsyth, his turn to writing fiction was born of financial need; he did not think himself cut out to be a novelist. As a boy, he said, he wanted to be "a fighter jock," and when he traded his career in the RAF for journalism, it was "to see the world" as a foreign and war correspondent. As for becoming a novelist, he confessed "I never wanted to be a writer," but wrote his first full-length novel, The Day of the Jackal, because he was "skint, stony broke."[10] He applied similar research techniques to those used in journalism. Published in 1971, the book became an international bestseller and gained its author the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In this story, the Organisation armée secrète hires an assassin to kill then–French President Charles de Gaulle. It was made into a film of the same name.
In Forsyth's second full-length novel, The Odessa File (1972), a reporter attempts to track down an ex-Nazi SS officer in contemporary Germany. The reporter discovers him via the diary of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who committed suicide earlier, but he is being shielded by an organization that protects ex-Nazis, called ODESSA. This book was later made into a movie with the same name, starring Jon Voight, but there were substantial alterations. Many of the novel's readers assumed that ODESSA really existed, but historians disagree.[11]
In The Dogs of War (1974) a British 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 a colossal platinum-ore reserve. This book was also adapted into a 1980 film starring Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger.
The Shepherd was an illustrated novella published in 1975. It tells of a nightmare journey by an RAF pilot while flying home for Christmas in the late 1950s. His attempts to find a rational explanation for his eventual rescue prove as troublesome as his experience.
Following this came The Devil's Alternative in 1979, which was set in 1982. In this book, the Soviet Union faces a disastrous grain harvest. The US is ready to help for some political and military concessions. A Politburo faction fight ensues. War is proposed as a solution. Ukrainian freedom fighters complicate the situation later. In the end, a Swedish oil tanker built in Japan, a Russian airliner hijacked to West Berlin and various governments find themselves involved.
In 1982, No Comebacks, a collection of ten short stories, was published. Some of these stories had been written earlier. Many were set in the Republic of Ireland where Forsyth was living at the time. One of them, There Are No Snakes in Ireland, won him a second Edgar Allan Poe Award, this time for best short story.
The Fourth Protocol was published in 1984 and involves renegade elements within the Soviet Union attempting to plant an atomic bomb near an American airbase in the UK, intending to influence the upcoming British elections and lead to the election of an anti-NATO, anti-American, anti-nuclear, pro-soviet Labour government. The 1987 adaptation starred Pierce Brosnan and Michael Caine. Almost all of the political content was removed from the film.
Forsyth's tenth book came in 1989 with The Negotiator, in which the American President's son is kidnapped and one man's job is to negotiate his release.
Two years later, in 1991, The Deceiver was published. It includes four short stories reviewing the career of British secret agent Sam McCready. At the start of the novel, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State (PUSS) of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office requires the Chief of the SIS to push Sam into early retirement. The four stories are presented to a grievance committee in an attempt to allow Sam to stay on active duty with the SIS.
In 1999, Forsyth published The Phantom of Manhattan, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. It was intended as a departure from his usual genre; Forsyth's explanation was that "I had done mercenaries, assassins, Nazis, murderers, terrorists, special forces soldiers, fighter pilots, you name it, and I got to think, could I actually write about the human heart?"[12] However, it did not achieve the same success as his other novels, and he subsequently returned to modern-day thrillers.
In 2001, The Veteran, another collection of short stories, was published, followed by Avenger, published in September 2003, about a Canadian billionaire who hires a Vietnam veteran to bring his grandson's killer to the US. Avenger was released as a film starring Sam Elliott and Timothy Hutton.[13]
The Afghan, published in August 2006, is an indirect sequel to The Fist of God. Set in the very near future, the threat of a catastrophic assault on the West, discovered on a senior al-Qaeda member's computer, compels the leaders of the US and the UK to attempt a desperate gambit — to substitute a seasoned British operative, retired Col. Mike Martin (of The Fist of God), for an Afghan Taliban commander being held prisoner at Guantánamo Bay.
The Cobra, published in 2010, features some of the characters previously featured in Avenger, and has as its subject an attempt to destroy the world trade in cocaine.
On 20 August 2013, his novel The Kill List was published. It was announced earlier in June that year that Rupert Sanders would be directing a film version of the story.[14]
On 10 September 2015, Forsyth's autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, was published.
In January 2018 it was announced that Forsyth would publish his eighteenth novel, a thriller about computer hackers, inspired by the Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon stories.[15]The Fox was published in electronic format in October 2018, and released in hardcover in November. The Fox is an espionage thriller about an autistic but gifted hacker.
In September 2005, Forsyth appeared on the ITV gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and raised £250,000 for charity. He offered the answer to the £500,000 question but, despite being correct, he decided to take £250,000. On 8 February 2007, Forsyth appeared on BBC's political panel show Question Time; on it, he expressed scepticism on the subject of anthropogenic climate change. On 26 March 2008, he also appeared on BBC's The One Show. On 17 June 2008, Forsyth was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live Midday News in relation to the restoration of the Military Covenant. On 2 February 2015, he appeared on Eggheads as a member of Rewarding Talent.
Forsyth has been married twice, first to former model Carole Cunningham between 1973 and 1988, with whom he had two sons Stuart and Shane, and then to Sandy Molloy, since 1994.[20][21] He also had a relationship with actress Faye Dunaway.[22] Forsyth previously resided in a manor house in Hertfordshire with his family before moving to Buckinghamshire in 2010.[23][24][25]
In 2016, he said he was giving up writing thrillers because his wife had told him he was too old to travel to dangerous places.[26]
The following four works listed above are not fictional novels or novellas: The Biafra Story (1969), Emeka (1982), Great Flying Stories (1991) and The Outsider (2015).
Filmography
As writer only (except for Soldiers, as presenter)
Forsyth wrote lyrics to a lament titled "Fallen Soldier", with music by Gareth Ellis Williams, which was released as a single by Royal Opera House soprano Melissa Alder in 2016.[27]
The Day of the Jackal (1971) is a political thriller novel by English author Frederick Forsyth about a professional assassin who is contracted by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organisation, to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.
Chukwuemeka "Emeka" Odumegwu Ojukwu was a Nigerian military officer and politician who served as President of the Republic of Biafra from 1967 to 1970 during the Nigerian Civil War. He previously served as military governor of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, which he declared as the independent nation of Biafra.
ODESSA is an American codename coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as "ratlines". Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an English author of thrillers, in particular spy novels, who introduced a new realism to the genre. Also working as a screenwriter, Ambler used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.
The Fist of God is a 1994 suspense novel by British writer Frederick Forsyth, with a fictitious retelling of the Iraqi Project Babylon and the resulting "supergun".
The Odessa File is a thriller by English writer Frederick Forsyth, first published in 1972, about the adventures of a young German reporter attempting to discover the location of a former SS concentration-camp commander.
The Dogs of War (1974) is a war novel by British writer Frederick Forsyth, featuring a small group of European mercenary soldiers hired by a British industrialist to depose the government of the fictional African country of Zangaro. The story details a geologist's mineral discovery, and the preparations for the attack: soldier recruitment, training, reconnaissance, and the logistics of the coup d'état. Like most of Forsyth's work, the novel is more about the protagonists' occupational tradecraft than their characters. The source of the title, The Dogs of War, is Act III, scene 1, line 270 of Julius Caesar (1599), by William Shakespeare: Cry, 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war.
Icon is a thriller novel by British author Frederick Forsyth. Its plot centres on the politics of the Russian Federation in 1999, with an extremist party close to seizing power. Published by Bantam Press in September 1997, (ISBN 978-0-553-57460-9), Icon became a New York Times Bestseller and was adapted into a television film.
This is a list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1970s, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The list features the most popular novels of each year from 1970 through 1975.
The Odessa File is an 1974 thriller film, adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, about a reporter's investigation of a neo-Nazi political-industrial network in post-Second World War West Germany. The film stars Jon Voight, Mary Tamm, Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell and was directed by Ronald Neame, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was the only film that the Schell siblings made together.
The Day of the Jackal is a 1973 political thriller film directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale. Based on the 1971 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, the film is about a professional assassin known only as the "Jackal" who is hired to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle in the summer of 1963.
A political thriller is a thriller that is set against the backdrop of a political power struggle, high stakes and suspense is the core of the story. The genre often forces the audiences to consider and understand the importance of politics. The stakes in these stories are immense, and the fate of a country is often in the hands of one individual. Political corruption, organized crime, terrorism, and warfare are common themes.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Published in 2006 by 4th Estate in London, the novel tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard.
Rolf Steiner is a German retired mercenary. He began his military career as a French Foreign Legion paratrooper and saw combat in Vietnam, Egypt, and Algeria. Steiner rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel commanding the 4th Commando Brigade in the Biafran Army during the Nigerian Civil War, and later fought with the Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan.
David Hugh "Taffy" Williams was a Welsh-born South African mercenary who fought for the State of Katanga during the Congo Crisis (1960–1963) and the Republic of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970).
Spider-Island is a 2011 comic book storyline starting in The Amazing Spider-Man and crossing over into other comic books published by Marvel Comics, most of which were limited series or one-shots specifically for this storyline. The main plot involves the inhabitants of Manhattan Island mysteriously gaining powers similar to Spider-Man. It features the return of the Jackal and the Queen to the Marvel Universe and laid the ground work for the second volume of the Scarlet Spider series. The main story overall received positive reviews, with critics praising its action, humor, style, and plot.
The Abagana Ambush was an ambush by Biafran guerrilla troops led by Major Jonathan Uchendu that wiped out the Nigerian 2 Division. Of the 6,000 Nigerian troops ambushed, only a very small number survived, including the 2nd Division's commander, General Murtala Muhammed.
Frederick Forsyth Presents is a series of British made-for-television films made by FremantleMedia for London Weekend Television on ITV, first broadcast between 2 December 1989 to 8 December 1990.
The Biafra Story is a 1969 non-fiction book by Frederick Forsyth about the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70) in which Biafra unsuccessfully attempted to secede from Nigeria. Reportedly one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of the war from the Biafran perspective, a revised edition was published after the war in 1977.
Marc Goosens was a Belgian mercenary who fought in the Yemeni Civil War and served in the army of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. He was killed by Nigerian forces in Onitsha during Operation Hiroshima.
↑ Norman, Matthew (30 June 2003). "Diary, 26 June 2003". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 12 May 2011.
↑ Frederick Forsyth, "Author's Note: A Rather Undeserving Scribe," introduction to New American Library re-issue of The Day of the Jackal (New York: Penguin, 2012), vi-vii.
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