Remembering Frederick Forsyth

Time of India

13-06-2025

This is not an obituary of Frederick Forsyth, just a fan's recollection. Obituaries will be many (if the team at The Economist becomes a little 'pop' and less woke perhaps it will do it). Forsyth's demise is passing of an era, a genre of writing that was an intersection of espionage, wars, racy thrillers with pop heroism, crime intertwined in the history and the geo-politics of world war II, Cold war and post-colonial era. All these themes churned well into a large and rich corpus of best sellers that Frederick Forsyth produced over five decades, with remarkable success- Day of the Jackal, Odessa File, Devil's Alternative, Dogs of War, The Shepherd, Fourth Protocol, Phantom of Manhattan, The Afghan, Kill List- among others. Eminently readable, the racy novels interspersed with superb short stories collections: No Comebacks, The Veteran, The Deceiver. Quite a few of these were made into movies- successful ones.
For the Gen X types (me included), these books were the closest we could come to the thrills, the intrigues and complexities of the post-colonial, cold war era. The 70s and 80s, the pre-globalization era, when India was a distant spectator to the bipolar world and when our windows to the world was confined to the papers, Illustrated Weekly, Archies, Commandos- Frederick Forsyth, Alistair Maclean, Leon Uris, Robert Ludlum were our windows to the world of espionage, global politics and statecraft.
And in this genre Forsyth was in a class of his own. Alistair Maclean was too World War II British type. Ludlum too racy and too American, Leon Uris was too historical (and boringly voluminous to many). Forsyth was the perfect mix of the setting, context, events and of course a good story. The humanness of his characters, their strivings, success and failures, was endearing. None were superheroes, at best a phantom like Johnny Kravanagh in The Shepherd (made into a short film starring Ben Radcliffe and John Travolta (available on Disney Hotstar). The stories, actors were so close to reality that to an impressionable mind growing up in the 1980s, it all seemed real.
That Forsyth was a trained Royal Air Force Pilot who saw action in the 1960s, an intelligence operative, BBC correspondent (when BBC was credible and respected) helped imparting that sense of realism to his racy scripts. Meticulous research, delving deep in history, and immaculate detailing made his writing so vivid that one did not need a motion picture adaptation- be it the murky world of the mercenaries in the 1960s Africa (Calo 'Cat' Shannon and his bunch in The Dogs of War) or the sordid saga of a concentration camp in Riga and the hunt for a Nazis war criminal in The Odessa File (the movie was so damn underwhelming). From the point of recall value, Day of the Jackal remains Forsyth's number one- again it was the detailing- whether forgery of documents, the ballistics and the taut plot woven so intricately around historical events that it all seemed real.
His canvas stretched wider with cold war thrillers like Devil's Alternative which perhaps for the first time revealed Ukrainian subnationalism to the English-speaking world which had hitherto seen USSR as a Russian megalith, and the Fourth Protocol. In the 1990s and the subsequent decades after the cold war, his works centered around the themes of international terrorism, narcotics, and theaters in West Asia and Afghanistan in the works like The Afghan, The Veteran. These books may have lacked the nostalgia, the appeal and the readership of his earlier works, but they held their own against the forces of new mass media and information overload, which had somewhat demystified the arcane world of global geo-politics, espionage, crime syndicates and all.
The last book of Forsyth that I read was the Kill List, it had all the attributes of a good Frederick Forsyth novel. It was to be made into a film and I just hope with so many OTT platforms and the popularity of the genre someone will take up that work.
A writer's impressionability is to a great extent determined by the reader's age and sensibility. Like today, in my 50s, it is more of Pico Iyer or the right of center Political Economists and historians and scientists turned philosophers. But even to an ageing mind, the knowledge of these scholars and their wisdom is absolutely no match for the taut plot, storytelling and attention to detail and research of Frederick Forsyth- especially for the generation that grew up in the 70s and the 80s. Though sorry for his demise- even at 86 he had some juice left in the tank- it was a life well lived. It was disciplined, organized, successful and fulfilling. Thank you, Frederick for enriching ours.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.