He was a novelist, secret agent and journalist. British writer Frederick Forsyth, one of the masters of spy novel, a notably author of JackalHe died on Monday, June 9 at age 86, his literary agent announced. “We regret the disappearance of one of the world’s greatest authors in the world,” wrote his agent Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown, in a statement.
Frederick Forsyth is the author of about twenty novels that have sold about 75 million copies worldwide. According to Curtis Brown, Frederick Forsyth died at home on Monday morning, surrounded by his family, after a brief illness.
“After being one of the youngest pilots of the Royal Air Force, he turned to journalism, using his gift for languages (German, French and Russian),” said his agent.
“De Gaulle’s shadow”
He covered for the BBC the civil war in Biafra, in the southeast of Nigeria, in the late 1960s. He was also a secret agent. With his first novel, Jackal (1971), “It has instantly become the author of the bestsellers around the world,” Jonathan Lloyd said.
In this book, he was inspired by the attack of Petit-Claart, near Paris, who addressed the French president Charles de Gaulle on August 22, 1962. Between 1961 and 1963, “I became the shadow of De Gaulle,” he said in his autobiography Stranger (2016).
It was the end of the Algerian war and the time of the OAS, a clandestine armed organization near the extreme French right and opposite to Algerian independence. “The day of the little attack by Clamart, I was in Paris … I found the backdrop of my first book there,” according to Frederick Forsyth.
It was the correspondent of the Reuters agency in Paris. In another book, The ODESSA file (1972), narrated the search for ancient Nazis. “In August 2025, we will publish Odessa revengeThe rest of your classic The ODESSA file“Said his editorial on Monday, TransWorld. Several of Frederick Forsyth’s books were adapted to the cinema, of which Jackal AND The ODESSA file.
Source: BFM TV
