Legendary Thriller Author Frederick Forsyth Passes Away at 86
Frederick Forsyth, photo by Gillian Shaw.
Frederick Forsyth, bestselling author, British RAF pilot, and journalist died on Monday, June 9, 2025.
He wrote eighteen espionage thrillers including THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, THE ODESSA FILE, THE FOURTH PROTOCOL, THE DOGS OF WAR, THE DEVIL’S ALTERNATIVE, THE FIST OF GOD, ICON, THE VETERAN, AVENGER, THE AFGHAN, THE COBRA, THE KILL LIST, and THE FOX.
He wrote two short story collections, and two previous nonfiction books including his 2015 memoir THE OUTSIDER. On November 18, 2025, Putnam will be publishing the REVENGE OF ODESSA, the long-awaited sequel to THE ODESSA FILE (co-written by Tony Kent).
Forsyth won the Diamond Dagger Award from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association in 2012 for a career of sustained excellence. Forsyth’s books frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film: THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, THE ODESSA FILE, THE DOGS OF WAR, and THE FOURTH PROTOCOL. ICON was made into a television mini-series, and a major film based on THE KILL LIST has been optioned. Most recently, Peacock aired a modernized series adaptation of THE DAY OF THE JACKAL starring Eddie Redmayne.
At the age of nineteen, Forsyth became the youngest pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force. From the moment he sat in the seat of a Royal Air Force Spitfire during the Battle of Britain as a five-year-old English boy, he wanted only to fly. Turning down the chance to go to Oxford or Cambridge, he relentlessly pursued that goal. But when it became clear during Britain’s austere postwar years that he would not be able to continue flying jet fighters, he switched to the only other career he could think of that would offer him the same level of excitement and allow him to see the world: foreign correspondent.
Following a chance encounter, Forsyth found himself inside the door of one of the world’s most respected, prestigious foreign news agencies, Reuters, where he began at an editorial desk job in London. Months later, aided by his fluency in French, he landed in Paris on his first assignment in May 1962. It was a time of historical turmoil; the city a target of frequent terrorist attacks linked to the Algerian war for independence. Furious at President Charles de Gaulle for acceding to the rebels’ demands, a faction of right-wing French military officers was determined to assassinate him. His extraordinary experience in Paris would eventually, and totally unforeseeably, lead to Forsyth’s first, blockbuster novel, THE DAY OF THE JACKAL.
On his next spellbinding assignment, Forsyth writes: “It was April 24, 1964, and it was two o’clock in the morning. I was in my car, twisting and turning my way through the coffin-dark streets of East Berlin.” Under constant surveillance in this focal point of tension between East and West at the height of the Cold War, he inadvertently almost started the Third World War with his reporting of Communist troop movements. On a side trip to Prague, he unwittingly dallied with an attractive Czech secret police agent. After a year, he was forced to make a speedy exit from East Berlin after learning that a beautiful woman with whom he was having an affair was actually the mistress of the East German defense minister.
Later in West Germany, Forsyth beat an even hastier retreat from Hamburg, where he dove through the open window of a train after offending one of the world’s most powerful and ruthless illegal arms dealers. Forsyth’s experiences in the two Germanys would ultimately become the inspiration for his second novel, THE ODESSA FILE, about the massive penetration of the post-war German governments by ex-Nazis, and their concerted efforts to protect war criminals from prosecution.
Likewise, Forsyth’s reporting stint in Africa during the Nigerian civil war and the ensuing Biafran famine, which killed one million children and aroused the sympathy and outrage of the world, became the basis for his third novel, THE DOGS OF WAR. During that conflict, Forsyth was strafed by a fighter jet, nearly lost his leg to a bullet that ripped through a plane in which he was a passenger, and almost lost his life after another plane he was riding in—filled with desperately ill Biafran children and Irish nuns—lost two of its four engines and barely avoided crashing into the sea.
Although Forsyth escaped with his life, his reporting career did not survive the Nigerian civil war. Having moved to the BBC, he made no secret of his disdain for official British government policy, which he believed had greatly lengthened the conflict and brought about the catastrophic famine. Still not yet thirty-five years old and essentially blackballed from journalism, he decided to get out of his predicament by writing a novel.
With no previous experience writing fiction, Forsyth finished THE DAY OF THE JACKAL in thirty-five days. Although it took him far longer to sell the book, yet the eventual publication of his debut novel immediately launched Frederick Forsyth on one of the most dazzling literary careers of our time. Applying the same demanding standards for accuracy required by journalism to his fiction, he has crafted novels that are not merely riveting, but meticulously researched and authentic in every detail.
Of course, there have been many more adventures, noteworthy and deeply influential events throughout Forsyth’s life, all vividly chronicled with his recognizable wit and gifted storytelling abilities in his memoir, THE OUTSIDER, including:
- Carrying secret documents in and out of East Germany on behalf of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, the MI6, and getting stopped by the secret police in the process.
- Landing in the midst of a bloody coup in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau, where Colombian drug cartels were sowing chaos.
- Saving another prominent journalist from getting shot; miraculously avoiding his own death—and amputation—after a brutal car crash at the age of 20, which left him in a coma before an almost complete recovery.
- Becoming the youngest pilot in the Royal Air Force and later, parachute-jumping with British Army trainees less than half his age.
- Getting financially wiped out at the age of fifty by a Bernie Madoff-like character.
- Asking the foreign minister of the last white supremacist government in South Africa what he was planning to do with the country’s nuclear bombs.
- Making a quick move from Ireland to England to avoid getting kidnapped by the IRA; almost dying in a typhoon in the Indian Ocean; traveling to Mogadishu, the war-torn capital of Somalia, for research against the wishes of his wife; and, at last, at the age of seventy-six, fulfilling his childhood ambition to fly a Spitfire.
He recently retired from his role as a part-time-journalist with a weekly column in the Express (UK). “A journalist should never join the Establishment,” he writes, “no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money, and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting, but never joining. In short, an outsider.”
“Frederick Forsyth was one of the undisputed true giants of international suspense fiction. We shall miss him dearly.”
—Neil Nyren former EVP, associate publisher, and editor in chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons
“Freddie Forsyth was the definition of a larger-than-life figure. He lived each day with outrageous abandon and heroic courage. in the field of thriller writing, he was second to none. It’s almost inconceivable that his first two thrillers were The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File—two undisputed classics of the genre. We at Putnam and Penguin Random House are proud to have been associated with him and wish him well on the greatest adventure of all.”
—Tom Colgan, VP, Editorial Director, Berkley
FREDERICK FORSYTH
August 25, 1938 – June 9, 2025