{"id":10929,"date":"2025-06-09T16:16:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T16:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10929"},"modified":"2025-09-07T19:52:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T19:52:23","slug":"10929","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10929","title":{"rendered":"Frederick Forsyth did more than write great thrillers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON – English writer Frederick Forsyth, who died today aged 86, not only wri0te \u00a0clever and exciting thrillers such as \u2018Day of the Jackal\u2019 (starring Edward Fox, above) \u00a0and \u2018The Odessa file\u2019, he also was prescient about world affairs.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolution and Zbigniew Brzezi\u0144ski, then U.S. National Security Advisor, declared that communism was dead. Many believed the Cold War was over. \u2018I\u2019m not, I\u2019m afraid, quite that sanguine,\u2019 Forsyth told me back then.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was talking to him about his latest novel \u2018The Negotiator\u2019 in March of that year. \u2018The end of communism; the end of the Soviet Union \u2026 it\u2019s a lovely idea; a lovely thought,\u2019 he said. \u2018Empires don\u2019t usually go away that fast. It took the British Empire probably fifty years to die and that was a fairly graceful death, at least without anything like the French wars.\u2019<\/p>\n

Moreover, he noted, the Soviet Union was not an oceanic empire. \u2018It\u2019s easy if the British want to give Cyprus back to the Cypriots because it\u2019s a long way away,\u2019 he said. \u2018If, however, you\u2019ve got a land-based empire and your colonies, so to speak, are on your very borders, that\u2019s very different.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Many of the bordering states, of course, did achieve independence from the Soviets but Forsyth predicted correctly that it was going to be \u2018a hell of a struggle\u2019 to persuade the masters of the Kremlin to give it to them.<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019re just not going to stand by and witness what they would see as the dismemberment of the homeland,\u2019 he said. \u2018It\u2019s not going to be over in a puff of smoke. As long as you have dedicated communists in control of Moscow, you\u2019re going to get a very high level of scepticism about us in the West. One knows beyond a doubt that there is a school of thought inside the hardest of hardline clubs in Moscow that regards any concession whatever to the west as anathema. They will always be with us. The question is whether or not they ever take charge.\u2019<\/p>\n

Born in my home town of Ashford, Kent, Forsyth’ had a long career as a newspaper reporter and columnist, often for the Daily Express. After his third novel, \u201cDogs of War\u201d, was published in 1974, it was reported that he planned to quit writing thrillers. He was quoted as saying, \u2018Well, that\u2019s it. I\u2019ve done the three I wanted to do. I don\u2019t like writing anyway and I\u2019m quitting.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t quite like that, Forsyth told me. \u2018I found myself in the summer of 1973, having prepared, researched, written, edited and promoted three novels in forty months, absolutely knackered. When someone asked about a fourth book, I said I had no plans to write any more novels. At the time, I didn\u2019t. I was taking a break, taking a rest. I didn\u2019t quite say never again; I said no plans. It was five years before I put pen to paper.\u2019<\/p>\n

That was in 1978 with \u2018The Devil\u2019s Alternative\u2019 and he went on to write more than a dozen more. An RAF pilot during World War II, he became a reporter for Reuters and the BBC with stories including an attempted assassination of then French president Charles de Gaulle, which inspired him later to write \u2018Day of the Jackal\u2019. He gained fame as a freelancer covering the civil war involving Nigeria and Biafra and with a non-fiction book titled \u2018The Biafra Story\u2019 published in 1969. Then he turned to fiction.<\/p>\n

\u2018As far as I was concerned, the whole \u201cJackal\u201d phenomenon was a total surprise, a real turn-up for the books,\u2019 he said. \u2018I more or less dashed it off in a space between assignments, as I thought to make a few quick quid and get back to journalism. It just took off and the sums involved were such that I\u2019d have been crazy to go on working for pennies when people were waving contracts at me.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>His first three books were all made into movies. Veteran British director Ronald Neame made \u2018The Odessa File\u2019, starring Jon Voight (pictured above) and Maximilian Schell. John Irwin, known best for the TV miniseries \u2018Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy\u2019 made \u2018The Dogs of War\u2019 with Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d heard that Forsyth hated the film version of \u2018Dogs of War\u2019 and he said, \u2018Yeah, well, no need to deny it.\u2019 He loved what Austrian filmmaker Fred Zinnemann, who was nominated for nine Academy Awards as best director and won three, did with \u2018Day of the Jackal\u2019 starring Fox and Michael Lonsdale.<\/p>\n

\u2018I think it\u2019s universal: it\u2019s a wonderful film,\u2019 Forsyth told me. \u2018Zinnemann, who\u2019s obviously a giant in film, really stuck closer to the story than anyone else ever bothered to do. The guys who snafued it were the ones who rewrote their own stories.\u2019\u00a0What about John Mackenzie\u2019s \u2018The Fourth Protocol\u2019 with Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan? \u2018Well, I produced that one,\u2019 he said. \u2018It\u2019s alright. Not as good as \u201cDay of the Jackal\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON – English writer Frederick Forsyth, who died today aged 86, not only wri0te \u00a0clever and exciting thrillers such as \u2018Day of the Jackal\u2019 (starring Edward Fox, above) \u00a0and \u2018The Odessa file\u2019, he also was prescient about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,6,7,1263,2257],"tags":[5392,5394,5393,3557],"class_list":["post-10929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-film","category-interviews","category-media","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","tag-day-of-the-jacka","tag-the-dogs-of-war","tag-the-odessa-file","tag-frederick-forsyth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10929"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11515,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10929\/revisions\/11515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}