Best-selling author Frederick Forsyth never intended to be a writer

British novelist Frederick Forsyth (right), who authored best-selling thrillers such as The Day Of The Jackal, has died aged 86, his publisher said.

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LONDON - British novelist Frederick Forsyth (right), who authored best-selling thrillers such as The Day Of The Jackal, has died aged 86, his publisher said.

A former correspondent for Reuters and the BBC, and an informant for Britain's MI6 foreign spy agency, Forsyth made his name by using his experiences as a reporter in Paris to pen the story of a failed assassination plot on French president Charles de Gaulle.

The Day Of The Jackal, in which an English assassin is hired by French paramilitaries angry at de Gaulle's withdrawal from Algeria, was published in 1971 after Forsyth found himself penniless in London. The 1973 film starred English actor Edward Fox.

Written in just 35 days, the book was rejected by a host of publishers who worried that the story would not sell as de Gaulle had not been assassinated. De Gaulle died in 1970 from a ruptured aorta.

But Forsyth's hurricane-paced thriller - complete with journalistic-style detail and brutal subplots of lust, betrayal and murder - was an instant hit. The once-poor journalist became a wealthy writer of fiction.

"I never intended to be a writer at all," Forsyth later wrote in his memoir, The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue. "After all, writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, even more so."

Forsyth presented himself as a cross between Ernest Hemingway and John le Carre - both action man and Cold War spy - but delighted in turning around the insult that he was a literary lightweight.

"I am lightweight but popular. My books sell," he once said.