Story Teller Extraordinaire

I don’t think anyone writes thrillers better than Frederick Forsyth. The Day of the Jackal. The Odessa File. The Dogs of War. The Shepard. The Negotiator. The Fist of God. I loved each of them and always wondered: books so insanely detailed, could they be just great fiction or was this reality?

I picked up Forsyth’s autobiography titled The Outsider hoping to see if it might answer my question.

A journalist by profession, his stint in Paris during (who else?) Charles de Gaulle’s rule sowed the seeds for The Day of the Jackal in a macabre way. De Gaulle was very unpopular after his decision to pull out of Algeria and so:

“(The press corps in Paris were in) permanent attendance… every time he had made some journey outside the presidential mansion… It was not to cover his visit to the Senate or whatever.  It was for that cataclysmic moment when he was assassinated.”

Getting the book published was tough not just because Forsyth was an unknown author but also publishers worried that readers would react by saying, “We know the climax already, the plan fails”! It took a lot of effort to explain that the plot was about “the manhunt as the assassin came closer and closer, eluding the huge machine ranged against him”.

The initial rejections were to be expected. But (finally) when it rains, it pours. The publisher who agreed would do it only if he signed a 3 book contract. Forsyth though had no idea what else to write about.

Then he remembered from his stint in East Berlin “a mysterious organization of former Nazis who helped, protected and warned each other” called ODESSA. What Forsyth had then dismissed as typical “East German propaganda against the Bonn government” became the plot for his second book, The Odessa File!

His stint as a war journalist in Nigeria had exposed Forsyth to the fact that “there were several independent republics on the continent so small, so chaotic, so badly governed and defended that they could be toppled and taken over by a small group of professional soldiers.” Thus, mercenaries became the plot for the third book, The Dogs of War.

Forsyth had identified his 3 plots, the deal got signed, and the rest is history.

So what was the answer my question (just great fiction or was this reality?): in 1975, when a group of French mercenaries attacked the Comoros islands, all of them carried a French copy of The Dogs of War “so that they could constantly find out what they were supposed to do next”!