The Forsyth Saga

Chris Hallam pays tribute to writer Frederick Forsyth

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In 2015, the veteran author, Frederick Forsyth, by then aged 76, unleashed his latest spellbinding adventure. The opening sentences of the latest volume from the man who had already produced such classic bestselling thrillers as The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974) hinted at some of the excitement to follow. Our hero would, among other things, be strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, experience the ordeal of arrest by the East German secret police, have an affair with an attractive Czech secret agent and even come close to triggering World War Three.

But the book in question, The Outsider (2015), was not a novel. It was an autobiography: the story of Frederick Forsyth himself. Forsyth had been born in Ashford, Kent in August 1938. During the 1930s, his father had worked as a rubber planter in what was then British Malaya. The older Forsyth was lucky to return to Britain when he did. In 1942, the Japanese invaded. None of his friends who stayed behind survived the war.

During a wartime visit to an airfield in 1944, the five-year-old Freddie was briefly placed in the cockpit of a grounded Spitfire by a friendly pilot. He never forgot the thrill of the experience and vowed to become an RAF fighter pilot from that point on. As he grew older, he developed a flair for languages, nurtured during several childhood holidays on the continent. He was soon fluent in French, German, Spanish and Russian. According to his autobiography, on one such early trip to Europe, he almost died during an unsuccessful attempt to save a local man from drowning in a French river. During a teenaged excursion to Spain in 1956, he trained unsuccessfully to be a matador and had a “torrid affair” with a 35-year-old German countess. Forsyth later came to suspect she was an ex-Nazi.