I’m a big fan of Frederick Forsyth. That’s not to say I have
read all of his books, far from it, but I really like the way he writes,
blending fact with fiction. The stories are so much richer for it.
The first Frederick Forsyth novel I read was The Day of the
Jackal. I’d seen the brilliant film numerous times before I decided to read the
book. If anything the book is better, and knowing what was going to happen did
not spoil my enjoyment one bit. If anything it made me want to see the film
again.
The following is from a recent article in the Telegraph newspaper
Forsyth was flat broke, kipping on a friend’s sofa and tired of the hand-to-mouth slog of freelance life. So in the bitterly cold January of 1970, he sat down at the rickety fold-out table in his friend’s kitchen with his battle-scarred Empire Aristocrat typewriter and, in just 35 days, wrote the thriller that broke the mould.
The idea for The Jackal first dawned on him years earlier, while he was working for Reuters in Paris. Between 1961 and 1963 there was a series of assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle by a French terrorist group, the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), fighting to prevent Algerian independence. “It was just a question of watching the concentric rings of security around de Gaulle,” he says, “and coming to the conclusion that the OAS were not going to kill him. Most of the OAS were ex-army – which meant they were on file. Or they were white colonists from Algeria – neo-fascists.” If the terrorists really wanted the job done, Forsyth figured, they should hire an outsider: a professional hit man with no ties to them and no file with the French police.
“I went to the British Library and read copies of Le Monde and Figaro from the period. And I bought a street map of Paris.” He didn’t have high literary or commercial expectations. “I’d never wanted to be a writer. I devoured H Rider Haggard and John Buchan as a boy, and as a young man I admired the ingenuity of John le Carré, especially The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but I never thought of imitating him. Growing up, all I wanted to be was a pilot. I just saw writing a novel – stupidly – as a way of making a bit of money. A means to get me out of a jam.”
Frederick Forsyth uses his experiences to add detail and
authenticity to his stories. Advice often repeated to aspiring writers. I’m
attempting to write a novel at the moment but, if I wrote it based on my
experiences so far it would be about a young football loving lad who works in
factories until he ‘finds’ himself after being made redundant, and gets his
heart broken many times until he finds true love. Not exactly marketable
material in my mind.
The Odessa File was my second book of his I read. Again, I’d
seen the film first and, again, it did not spoil my enjoyment when reading the
book.
If time was more kind I’d love to read his other novels but
they will have to wait.
