British author Frederick Forsyth, known for ‘The Day of the Jackal’, passes away at 86.

The British novelist Frederick Forsyth, author of bestselling thrillers like The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War, has passed away at 86, as reported by the BBC on Monday. The writer published more than 25 books and sold over 75 million copies worldwide.

Forsyth was born in Kent in 1938 and was a war correspondent for Reuters and the BBC, as well as an informant for MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. He gained fame using his experience as a reporter in Paris to write the story of a failed assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, the novel The Day of the Jackal, which was adapted for film twice, by Fred Zinnemann in 1973 and by Michael Caton-Jones in 1997. These are just two adaptations of many made of his novels.

“I never intended to be a writer,” Forsyth later wrote in his memoirs, The Outsider – My Life in Intrigue. “After all, writers are strange creatures, and if they try to make a living from it, even more so.” He described himself as a mix between Ernest Hemingway and John le Carré, both an action man and a Cold War spy, but he loved to turn the insult of being a lightweight writer around: “I am lightweight, but popular. My books sell.”

Regarding The Day of the Jackal, his best-known work, its plot revolves around an English assassin, played in one of the films by Edward Fox, hired by French paramilitaries angered by de Gaulle’s withdrawal from Algeria; it was published in 1971 after Forsyth found himself broke in London.

Written in just 35 days, the novel was rejected by numerous publishers who feared it would fail as a story because de Gaulle had not been assassinated. De Gaulle died in 1970 from an aortic rupture while playing solitaire. But Forsyth’s gripping thriller, with journalistic-style details and brutal subplots of lust, betrayal, and murder, was an instant success. The novel was so influential that Venezuelan terrorist Illich Ramírez Sánchez was nicknamed Carlos the Jackal.

Forsyth, once a poor journalist, became a wealthy fiction writer.

His books, fantastic plots that almost reveled in the cynicism of an underground world of spies, criminals, hackers, and assassins, sold over 75 million copies. However, behind his bravado, there were hints of sadness. He later spoke of retreating into his imagination as an only child and solitary during and after World War II.

The isolated Forsyth discovered his talent for languages: he claimed to be a native French speaker by age 12 and a native German speaker by 16, largely thanks to exchanges. He attended Tonbridge School, one of England’s old private schools, and learned Russian with two Georgian princesses who emigrated to Paris. By 18, he added Spanish.

He also learned to fly and completed military service in the Royal Air Force, where he piloted fighter jets like a single-seat version of the de Havilland Vampire.

The Brit impressed Reuters editors with his languages and his knowledge that Bujumbura was a city in Burundi, which led to him being offered a position at the news agency in 1961, and he was sent to Paris and then to East Berlin, where the Stasi secret police closely monitored him.

He left Reuters to join the BBC but soon became disillusioned with its bureaucracy and what he saw as the corporation’s failure to properly cover events due to the incompetent post-colonial opinions of the government on Africa.

In 1968, Forsyth was contacted by the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, and an officer named “Ronnie” asked him to report on what was really happening in Biafra. According to him, he maintained contact with MI6, which he called “the Firm,” for many years. His novels displayed a thorough understanding of the spy world and even, he claimed, removed parts of The Fourth Protocol (1984) so that militants wouldn’t know how to detonate a nuclear bomb.

His writing was sometimes cruel, as when the Jackal kills his lover after she discovers he is a killer. “He looked at her, and for the first time, she realized that the gray specks in his eyes had spread and clouded his entire expression, which had become dead and lifeless, like a machine staring at her.”

After finally finding a publisher for The Day of the Jackal, Harold Harris of Hutchinson offered him a contract for three novels. This was followed by The Odessa File, in 1972, the story of a young German freelance journalist trying to locate SS member Eduard Roschmann, or the Butcher of Riga.

Then came The Dogs of War, in 1974, about a group of white mercenaries hired by a British mining mogul to kill the mad dictator of an African republic—based on Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea—and replace him with a puppet. The New York Times at the time said the novel was “aimed at the Saturday night movie audience in the suburbs” and was “filled with a kind of post-imperial condescension towards the black man.”

Divorced from Carole Cunningham in 1988, he married Sandy Molloy in 1994. However, he lost a fortune in an investment scam and had to write more novels to keep afloat. He had two sons, Stuart and Shane, with his first wife.

His later novels pitted hackers, Russians, Al-Qaeda militants, and cocaine traffickers against the forces of good, generally Britain and the West. But none of the novels reached the level of The Day of the Jackal. A supporter of the UK’s exit from the European Union, Forsyth criticized the British elites for what he called betrayal and naivety.

In his columns for the Daily Express, he offered a series of scathing critiques of the modern world from a right-wing intellectual perspective. The world, he said, cared too much about “the Eastern pandemic” (known to most as COVID-19), Donald Trump was “disturbed,” Vladimir Putin was “a tyrant,” and “Western liberals” were wrong about almost everything.

Until the end, he was a reporter who wrote novels. “In an increasingly obsessed world with the gods of power, money, and fame, a journalist and a writer must keep their distance,” he wrote. “Our job is to hold power accountable.”

[This is breaking news, and further updates will follow shortly]