Growing up, this writer’s mother often lamented that if one spent as much time poring over textbooks as one did perusing the collective works of Frederick Forsyth, one might have amounted to something worth writing about—instead of writing about worthless things. Tautologies, masquerading as jokes aside, Britain too has long mastered the art of making its hypocrisy sound like high wit.Take Yes Minister.There’s a hilarious episode where Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby team up to pressurise a BBC director into pulling an embarrassing interview. The BBC man initially refuses—until Sir Humphrey gently reminds him that failure to cooperate might result in budget cuts and, more scandalously, the loss of seats at Wimbledon and Royal Ascot. They all then solemnly agree that while the BBC mustn’t appear to give in to government pressure, they won’t air the interview due to “security implications.”
The brilliance of the scene lies in how comfortable the British—for all their lack of tastebuds—are with poking fun at the very institutions they hold dear. A taxpayer-funded broadcaster that can satirise both the government and itself without missing a beat.But Yes Minister—as brilliant as it is—is perhaps only the BBC’s second greatest contribution to the literary arts.The top spot, without contest, belongs to a former Royal Air Force pilot with an eye for detail and a knack for turning geopolitical chaos into page-turning precision: Frederick Forsyth, who departed for Elysium on June 9.And here’s the kicker: Forsyth might never have become an author at all had it not been for the BBC.Fate—disguised as institutional cowardice—had to intervene so that he could stumble into his true dharma.The story goes that once his flying days were over, Forsyth joined Reuters, before moving on to the Beeb.However, disgusted by BBC’s denial of genocide – a custom in which the Albion has shown a lot of promise – during the Biafra War in Nigeria, Forsyth quit in disgust and started covering the war as a freelancer.However, freelancing, as every freelancer worth her salt will tell you, led to penury. Broke, and living on a friend’s sofa he wrote the first manuscript of the book that came to be known as The Day of the Jackal, ostensibly within only 35 days. The Day of the Jackal was initially rejected because it dealt with a rather sticky subject – the attempted murder of a very much alive Charles De Gaulle – not to mention that the cold, journalistic style of writing, lack of a traditional Herculean hero, overt detailing, and a plot whose ending was preordained.The rest as they say is history.The Day of the Jackal sold over 10 million copies, become the inspiration for two movies, and a limited race-swapped limited series, but to reduce Forsyth’s legacy to The Day of the Jackal is like calling Bob Dylan the poet who wrote Blowing in the Wind. It’s simply one arrow in a quiver full of masterpieces.Forsyth was a masterful storyteller, an author who brought a journalist’s eye-for-detail with a poet’s gift for storytelling without getting into the literary quagmire of a John Le Carre that could alienate those with more limited grasp of the King’s.In fact, today, it’s almost hard to explain to a generation that has grown up on C-Bag, Instagram reels or TikTok videos, the magic that Forsyth produced on his vintage Olympia typewriter (he used them till his death).His attention to detail was legendary and reading his novels wasn’t just a walk through a story but a tour through space-time, a history lesson more enthralling than anything in one’s textbook.Take one’s favourite Avenger where we move from The Battle of Britain to Vietnam to Milosevic’s Yugoslavia to an unnamed South American republic with dodgy leaders ending on the night of September 10, 2001 with a plot twist that would boggle your mind.In The Dogs of War, we meet mercenaries with a plan that it’s almost a Cliff Notes on how to carry out a coup d’etat on an African nation. The fact that some mercenaries actually thought they were going to carry out an actual coup bears testimony to its hyperrealism. In The Fourth Protocol, we see the future of Labour politics and Leftism in Britain which will ally with any force inimical to the Western order. In Icon, Forsyth astutely predicts the rise of a Putin-like figure whose expansionist ways will become a threat to Europe if not stopped in time. Unfortunately, Forsyth’s protagonists only exist in the pages of novels whose effete real world versions pale in comparison. Today, as the world grapples with Putin trying to increase his sphere of influence, the book reads like a prophecy.Forsyth’s protagonists are a breed apart—neither the brooding intellectualism of Le Carré’s George Smiley nor the martini-drenched bravado of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. They are men of method, mission, and moral ambiguity—shaped more by bureaucracy and battlefield scars than by tuxedos or existential crises. Take Calvin Dexter, the tunnel rat turned avenger, who channels quiet rage into legal vigilantism, or Cat Shannon, a professional mercenary with a conscience honed in Africa’s cruel geopolitics. Jason Monk, ex-CIA and emotionally flayed by betrayal, stands at the cusp of East-West collapse in Icon.Then there’s Mike Martin, the SAS ghost who reappears across Forsyth’s work—first infiltrating Iraq in The Fist of God, then the Taliban in The Afghan. Paul Devereaux, the cold, calculating CIA man in The Cobra, is the closest Forsyth comes to a Bond figure—minus the glamour, doubled on ruthlessness. Even the teenage hacker Luke Jennings in The Fox is a far cry from traditional spy fiction—a vulnerable savant weaponised by Adrian Weston, a spymaster who knows the game is rigged. They’re professionals in a bureaucratic wilderness, soldiers of shadow wars and moral compromise—proof that in Forsyth’s world, heroism is about precision, not panache.And in The Outsider, Forsyth’s memoir is a debrief confirming the many things we already know and a few we didn’t like the fact that he did covert work for MI6, had a dalliance with an East Bloc spy and was part of back-channel talks to de-nuclearise post-Apartheid South Africa.Forsyth’s memoir is not a celebrity confessional—it’s a debrief. He writes of his time as a fighter pilot, his disillusionment with journalism during Biafra, and his covert work for MI6. He describes his writing method with the same precision as his fictional operatives.You finish the book understanding that Frederick Forsyth didn’t write thrillers. He lived them. Then redacted just enough to publish. And in that, Forsyth was a journalist through and through. And maybe reading his books was far more entertaining, if not useful, than reading one’s textbooks.
