Bestselling novelist Frederick Forsyth, author of 'The Jackal,' dies

BarcelonaFrederick Forsyth was just over thirty years old when, from his first novel, Day of the Jackal –Available in Spanish at Plaza & Janés with the title Jackal-, managed to sell millions of copies around the world. Jackal It was rejected by several publishers due to the project's poor commercial viability, given that de Gaulle had survived the attack. Published in 1971, the novel's success caught the attention of Hollywood, which quickly adapted it: Fred Zinemman directed the project, starring Derek Jacobi, Edward Fox, and Michael Lonsdale, and released in 1973.

Born in Ashford, Kent, in 1938, Frederick Forsyth spent a few years in international journalism—in 1967 he covered the conflict between Nigeria and Biafra—before trying his hand at fiction because "he was short of money." Since Jackal, Forsyth became one of the most popular names in political thrillers, with titles such as The Odessa File (1972), focused on the pursuit of a high-ranking Nazi commander after the end of World War II, The dogs of war (1974), on the hiring of mercenaries by a Central African country during a change of government, and The Devil's Alternative (1979), the story of a nationalist uprising in Ukraine during the Cold War in the midst of the agricultural crisis in Soviet Russia.

The value of carrying out a good idea

During the 1970s, Forsyth's popularity grew thanks to the film adaptation of many of his novels. Among the best known, apart from Jackal, was The dogs of war –played by Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger– and The fourth protocol (1987), with such well-known faces as Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan. Forsyth explained that he had written Jackal in "a month, writing a dozen pages a day." "The key to the book's success is that there is a double pursuit," he added, "on the one hand, that of the assassin who wants to kill De Gaulle; on the other, that of the French intelligence services pursuing the assassin." Jackal It was adapted a second time – in 1997 – by Michael Caton Jones, with Richard Gere and Bruce Willis, and last year a television version arrived: the killer, played by Eddie Redmayne, was pursued in this case by a female spy, Lashana Lynch.

Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, Frederick Forsyth sold more than 75 million copies of his thrillers, which were translated into more than 40 languages (in Catalan, but there are very few books). In recent years, in parallel with his work as a novelist, the writer made his conservatism and Euroscepticism a flag and was actively involved in the Better Off Out initiative, which worked to make Brexit a reality, while also promoting the think tank Conservative Young Britons Foundation. Although he announced in 2016 that he was giving up writing because his creative method involved "traveling to places that were too dangerous," he recently teamed up with another novelist, Tony Kent, to write Revenge of Odessa, a sequel to one of his first books.

On the occasion of the publication of the volume of memoirs The intruderIn 2015, Forsyth revealed to the Sunday Times who had been part of MI6, the British secret spy service, for over twenty years. On one occasion, in East Germany in 1973, he was arrested by police on the Bavarian border and nearly lost the documents he had obtained during his mission. In fact, the British secret service had read Forsyth's books prior to their publication to ensure they wouldn't compromise any of their agents.