British thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, the author of The Day of The Jackal, has died at the age of 86, his literary agents Curtis Brown said on Monday, June 9. "We mourn the passing of one of the world's greatest thriller writers," his agent Jonathan Lloyd said. Forsyth died at home on Monday morning surrounded by his family following a brief illness, according to Curtis Brown.
A pilot who turned to writing to clear his debts, Forsyth penned some 20 spy novels, often drawing on real-life experiences and selling 70 million copies worldwide. Forsyth honed a distinctive style of deeply researched and precise espionage thrillers involving power games between mercenaries, spies and scoundrels.
For inspiration, he drew on his own globe-trotting life, including an early stint as a foreign correspondent and assisting Britain's spy service on missions in Nigeria, South Africa, and the former East Germany and Rhodesia.
"The research was the big parallel: as a foreign correspondent you are probing, asking questions, trying to find out what's going on, and probably being lied to," he told The Bookseller magazine in 2015. "Working on a novel is much the same... essentially it's a very extended report about something that never happened – but might have."
He wrote his first novel when he was 31, on a break from reporting and in dire need of money to fund his wanderlust.
Having returned "from an African war, and stony broke as usual, with no job and no chance of one, I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts," he said in his autobiography The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue published in 2015. "There are several ways of making quick money, but in the general list, writing a novel rates well below robbing a bank."
But Forsyth's foray came good. Taking just 35 days to pen The Day of the Jackal, his story of a fictional assassination attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle by right-wing extremists, met immediate success when it appeared in 1971. The novel was later turned into a film and provided self-styled revolutionary Carlos the Jackal with his nickname.
Forsyth went on to write a string of bestsellers including The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).