By Tirthankar Mitra
His first love was reporting. And while on the job in locations as diverse as Paris and Biafra, Frederick Forsythe who passed away on June 9 dug out the nuggets of lives unknown which would later be the material of his best selling fiction. He was 86.Forsythe did not pen timeless pieces of literature. His works were fiction, pure and simple.
But they sold like hot cakes .It made Forsythe a very wealthy man and let him into high society on which his novels had ample takes. His was a rags to riches story. For he was penniless in London when his debut novel The Day of the Jackal was published.
It was based on a imaginary plot to assassinate De Gaulle by some former French military officers after the decision to withdraw from Algeria. Incidentally, De Gaulle died of a ruptured aorta while playing Solitaire
From a once poor journalist Forsythe became a wealthy man. The sea change of his material status ushered in an image makeover. He was portrayed as a typical upper class Englishman dolled up in a tweed jacket and club tie. It earned him a modelling assignment for Rolex watch in which the author makes a style statement pitching for the wrist watch synonymous with luxury and precision.
But it was a hard climb to the top; The Day of the Jackal was written in just 35 days. The novel which was to become a runaway bestseller was rejected by a host of publishers. These publishers who felt that they knew better than the author pointed out that De Gaulle was not assassinated. And the book will not sell, it was opined.
The readers proved them wrong. A superbly made cocktail of sub plots of brutality, lust, murder and betrayal spiced with the inner workings of French and English bureaucracy and a terrorist organisation, the book was an instant hit.
Frederick Forsythe had kicked off a new genre of writing. This was hurricane pace thrillers garnished with journalistic style details. And the writing style still survives. There are many clones but none of them is a Forsythe. Spies, assassins, mercenaries, Nazi war criminals, radical left wingers were the characters in his novels. All of them were embedded in geo-politics.
Forsythe’s attention to detail was infectious. The assembling of a gun and dissembling it come to readers almost visually as they go through The Day of the Jackal. His next novel The Odessa Files was a pointer that he was no one book author. It was about a young German journalist in the trail of Nazi war criminal, Eduard Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga.
It was criticised for using a painful period of history to spring a “quick thrills”. But the author held his ground saying it was about Nazis “living among us.” His subsequent works be it The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator to name a few, are all marked by an eye for the detail. Forsythe wrote about a chaotic world in which his unconventional heroes sought to bring some order. That is how his books brought realism through thrillers. Small wonder, they were instant hits.
“I never intended to be a writer” Forsythe stated in his memoirs. “After all, the writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, all the more so.” He knew what he was talking about though his books sold more than 70 million copies. He maintained he wrote thrillers to make money.
His forte was not drama. But he assembled facts with care in a way one assembles a jigsaw puzzle while solving it. But that does not in any way reduce his stature as an author. The writer of The Day of the Jackal vindicated himself in his first attempt.
Arguably not a storyteller of the class of Rudyard Kipling, a fellow countryman, Forsythe shared a commonality with the man who was more loyal to the crown than the king. Englishmen were often central characters of his novels, be it as heroes like “Cat” Shannon in The Dogs of War or the most memorable villains of all -Jackal. (IPA Service)
