Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Approached by the British Mi6 while reporting on the Biafra war of Nigeria, he extracted his experiences of literary inspiration.
The successful British novelist Frederick Forsyth, author of around 20 spy thrillers, died at the age of 86.
Forsyth, who was a journalist and informant of the British spy agency of the MI6 before turning hands towards the writing of successful novels like the day of the jackal, died on Monday at his home in the village of Jordans in the Buckinghashire, said Jonathan Lloyd, his agent.
“We mourn the death of one of the greatest writers of Thriller in the world,” said Lloyd about the author, who started writing novels to erase his debts at the start of the thirties, to sell more than 75 million pounds.
“There are several ways to earn rapid money, but in the general list, writing a new price well below stealing a bank,” he said in his 2015 autobiography, The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue.
The bet borne fruit after writing on the day of the jackal – its story of an attempted fictitious assassination on the French president Charles de Gaulle by right -wing extremists – in just 35 days.
The novel achieved immediate success when it was released in 1971. It was then transformed into a film and led the Venezuelan revolutionary Illich Ramirez Sanchez nicknamed Carlos Le Jackal.
Forsyth then wrote a series of bestsellers, including the Odessa file (1972) and the Dogs of War (1974). His 18th novel, The Fox, was published in 2018.
Forsyth formed as a pilot of the Air Force, but his linguistic talents – he spoke French, German, Spanish and Russian – led him to the Reuters news agency in 1961 with publications in Paris and East Berlin during the Cold War.
He left Reuters for the BBC but quickly became disillusioned by his bureaucracy and what he saw as the failure of the company to properly cover the Nigeria because of the postcolonial opinions of the government on Africa.
His autobiography revealed how he became a spy, the author saying that he was approached by “Ronnie” of the Mi6 in 1968, who wanted “an asset deeply in the Enclave du Biafran” in Nigeria, where the civil war had broken out the previous year.
In 1973, Forsyth was invited to carry out a mission for the MI6 in East Communist Germany, leading his Convertible Triumph in Dresden to receive a pack of a Russian colonel in the toilets of the Albertinum Museum.
The writer said that he had never been paid by the MI6, but that in return received help with his research on the book and submitted project pages to ensure that he did not disclose sensitive information.
During its recent years, Forsyth has turned its attention to politics, delivering a wilt, the right takes the modern world in the columns of the Daily Express anti-European union.
Divorced by Carole Cunningham in 1988, he married Sandy Molloy in 1994. He lost a fortune in an investment scam in the 1980s and had to write more novels to support each other.
He had two sons, Stuart and Shane, with his first wife.
