Thomas Mauser

The late writer, Frederick Forsyth, was born in 1938 in the rural town of Ashford, Kent, England, and grew up loving the English countryside and its farms. He attended a private boys’ academy, Tonbridge School, on a scholarship and soon grew to detest the school atmosphere, rebelling against the school’s various forms of hazing – the bullying, running mindless errands for senior boys, and the beatings – and it marked him forever as an outsider.

He completed his national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a pilot and in 1961 joined Reuters as a journalist and then the BBC in 1965 as a diplomatic correspondent, covering stories in France and Africa. He covered the Biafran War as a freelance journalist in the late 1960s, and later wrote about his experiences in his book, The Biafra Story, published in 1969.

In 1971, financially broke and desperate, Forsyth wrote his first thriller novel, despite confessing to himself that he, “. . . never wanted to be a writer.”  That novel, The Day of the Jackal, became an international bestseller and was made into a film and, most recently, a television series. That first work marked the beginning of a sequence of successful thriller novels, among them The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, and The Dogs of War, with a number of them being made into films. Forsyth’s novels were influenced by his journalism training and experience – detailed research coupled with a journalistic, almost documentary, style of writing, with virtually no exploration of the various characters’ interior motives, emotions, personalities, or weaknesses.

Throughout his career as a writer, Frederick Forsyth held fast to several writing principles that guided him while he wrote his novels:

 Realism

Forsyth obsessed over vigorous, in-depth research that involved interviewing experts on the subject being written about, coupled with personally studying the topic at hand. Several of his observations are worth noting:

• “As a novelist nowadays, you have to assume that everything you say will be, for some reader somewhere (and maybe for hundreds of them), something they know a lot about. And they do not forgive slovenly descriptions riddled with errors. Frankly, it makes the task very hard work. You want to set a scene in Istanbul but cannot actually go there? Research it until a reader who lives there cannot find fault in your account.”
• “If you are starting out and funds are tight, the Internet and the reference library may be all that your budget will permit. For all that, do not stint on getting the facts right. Another resource is a book written by someone who knows a subject intimately. It may be a travelogue or a technical manual. There is no plagiarism if you simply lift the facts, because facts are facts and there is no copyright in them.”

Plot over Character Development

His two main concerns while writing his thriller novels were plot and authenticity; literary traditions that emphasized the development and exploration of characters – their interior motives, their psychological make-up, and their emotional journeys – as revealed in novels like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, were disregarded by Forsyth in favor of describing in great detail how a particular operation was undertaken or how a character (like the Jackal in The Day of the Jackal) caried out their activities.

Strict Writing Regimen

Forsyth would spend upwards of two years researching and thinking through each of his novels from beginning to end before committing anything to paper. Once his research and story analysis was completed, Forsyth would maintain a disciplined writing habit, writing ten pages a day from 8 AM to 12 PM until the first (and only) draft was completed. He would then mail his manuscript to his publisher and, when the proofs were returned to him via mail, he would make any necessary corrections before the corrected manuscript was published.