He never meant to be a writer. He wanted to see the world. But a war, an unpaid bill and a bit of luck led the bestselling writer to invent a new kind of thriller
“A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money, and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting, but never joining. In short, an outsider,” wrote bestselling author Frederick Forsyth (1938-2025), who has passed away at 86, in his 2015 memoir, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.
Forsyth, born in England’s county of Kent (Ashford), understood early that the most dangerous seduction for a journalist isn’t censorship or even violence, it’s access. The moment you begin to believe that being close to power is the same as understanding it, you’re no longer a reporter. You’re a courtier. And for Forsyth, who began his career filing foreign reports from behind the Iron Curtain and war zones in Africa, detachment was, far from being a posture, a discipline. The bird-on-a-rail metaphor he uses tells us of the difference between fiction and propaganda, between journalism and PR.
The Outsider stitches together a life lived in the thick of things as an RAF pilot training amid the Blitz, hitch‑hiking through Europe learning languages, spying for Reuters and the BBC in war‑torn Germany, Biafra, and beyond. He recounts close brushes with global power, almost igniting World War III in East Berlin, dodging Stasi tailing, surviving aerial fire in Nigeria, sharing drinks with a Nazi war criminal, and turning to fiction. Threaded through these snapshots are his reflections on power, curiosity, detachment, craft, and the outsider’s role. Each anecdote is delivered with deadpan humour and disciplined restraint, which reveals a man who write to satisfy an insatiable hunger to observe and explain.
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The Outsider stitches together a life lived in the thick of things as an RAF pilot training amid the Blitz, hitch‑hiking through Europe, learning languages, spying for Reuters and the BBC in war‑torn Germany, Biafra, and beyond. He recounts close brushes with global power, almost igniting World War III in East Berlin, dodging Stasi tailing, surviving aerial fire in Nigeria, sharing drinks with a Nazi war criminal, and turning to fiction. Threaded through these snapshots are his reflections on power, curiosity, detachment, craft, and the outsider’s role. Each anecdote is delivered with deadpan humour and disciplined restraint, which reveals a man who write to satisfy an insatiable hunger to observe and explain.
Journalism: A ticket to see the world
Having tasted the adrenaline of the cockpit as a fighter pilot at 19, Forsyth became a war correspondent at 23, and novelist by 30. He spent his life circling the frontlines of wars, ideas, literature, and never let the engines cool. He was never quite comfortable with the label “author.” To him, that sounded too genteel, too desk-bound, too restrictive. He was a man of the field: of muddy airstrips, backchannel meetings, oil-slicked coup plots and typewritten cables smuggled across borders. But, by drawing on war zones and intelligence briefings, he created a new genre that teased out fiction from facts.
The profession of journalist now is, of course, crowded with brand-building influencers and newsroom careerists eager to network their way up the staircase of soft power, but if we look back at Forsyth’s richly lived life, we are reminded, all over again, that journalism was never meant to be a comfortable seat at the table. It was always meant to be the cold, hard bench across the room. There’s something almost old-fashioned about Forsyth’s clarity of purpose, especially in an age when everyone is encouraged to cultivate a personal brand and play along with the algorithm.
In a passage on the death of children during the Biafran war, which will remind you of the thousands being killed in Gaza today, he writes: “There is nothing noble about war. The adjective may apply to those who have to fight in them in defense of cause or country. But war itself is cruel and brutal. Things happen in it that coarsen the senses and scar the memory. And the most vicious of all conflicts is the civil war.”
“Of the thousand memories I bore back from the two years I spent trying to convey the realities of Biafra to the readers of Britain, Europe, and the United States, the most abiding is that of the dying children. They died in the villages, by the road-sides, and, alongside those who survived on the relief food, in the feeding centers. These were established almost wholly around the missions-churches, schools, dispensaries, and a field the size of a football pitch, where they lay in the grass, on rush mats, or in the laps of their mothers, who held them close, watching them wither and slip away, and wondering why,” he adds.
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To Forsyth, being a writer wasn’t part of some grand plan or a childhood dream: he just wanted to see the world. That was the real itch: to get out, to move, to know what those faraway names meant when he saw them as datelines: Singapore, Beirut, Moscow. The idea of being a journalist seemed like the most direct way to do that, especially since he didn’t have money of his own to bankroll global adventures. Journalism, for him, became a ticket, and not quite a calling.
His early fascination with distant cities came from reading the Daily Express over his father’s shoulder at breakfast. What started as curiosity turned into obsession, and thanks to his father’s patience and the family encyclopaedia, Forsyth found himself building a mental map of the globe before he’d even left home. That kind of early attention to place and detail stayed with him. Being a foreign correspondent was simply a way to go live inside the questions he was already asking.
On the edge of things as a writer
Writing fiction only came into the picture because he was broke. Returning from a war zone with no job and a pile of debt, Forsyth had to improvise. So he tried a novel because he had run out of other ideas. The fact that it worked — and quickly — surprised him more than anyone else. But once he realised he had a knack for storytelling, he stuck with it. His books, though fiction, allowed him to keep travelling — only now it was for research. Being alone, working quietly, gathering material: it all became part of the job.
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The Day of the Jackal (1971), his debut and arguably his most well-known book, was his get-out-of-debt scheme, written on a friend’s sofa, typing 35 straight days in a frenzy, when the BBC dropped him for refusing to stop reporting on the Biafran War. That it became a global bestseller and reinvented political thriller was, in his words, “a very pleasant accident.” But anyone who’s read the book knows better. There’s nothing accidental about Forsyth’s work. It is research sharpened to a knife’s edge, storytelling with no accoutrements of sentiment or other such distractions.
Even after decades of writing bestsellers, Forsyth never stopped thinking like a reporter. That journalist’s mindset, the constant curiosity and mistrust of easy answers, remained his anchor. He believed writers should stay on the edge of things, never part of the machinery of power. That distance let him perceive more clearly, and write with sharper insight. He had a stubborn drive to see what lay beyond the next border. Writing, in the end, was the tool that helped him keep doing just that. He sold more than 75 million copies across a body of work that includes The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol, and The Fist of God. Many were turned into films. All bear his stamp: an amazing eye for detail.
The teller of tales
Forsyth’s early career saw him chase stories across Europe, from France’s political corridors to Germany’s Cold War divide. He reported the failed assassination of French general Charles de Gaulle, which became the inspiration for The Day of the Jackal. His decision to embed himself in Biafra against the reluctance of the editors was born of integrity — what he called indignation at “news management” (“It is not our policy to cover this war…”). That impulse, that refusal to appear neutral in the face of atrocity marked him as a correspondent willing to pay the price in moral currency.
Despite threats of travel and age, he kept writing. As recently as 2024, he completed Revenge of Odessa, co‑written with Tony Kent and scheduled for publication this August. And though he stepped back from dangerous reporting after his wife Sandy’s illness, he continued to write columns and ghost big-league policy essays up until days before his passing. As Forsyth e once wrote, real life often throws a plot twist; as a writer, he accepted them, chronicled them, and put them down on paper.
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The tone of The Outsider is straightforward. Forsyth never romanticises the writing life; he flatly admits he’s “slightly mercenary” and quite literally “write[s] for money”. His prose is brisk and unsentimental. One reviewer in The Guardian even noted it’s “so matter-of-fact” it reads like a sportsman’s autobiography. Forsyth clearly wrote to entertain a broad audience, not to woo literary critics. His critics quip that he effectively churned out “shallow and undemanding poolside thrillers”— fun, fact-packed yarns built to thrill a mass readership. In The Outsider, he makes no bones about it: like The Day of the Jackal, his memoir boasts of storytelling pared down to the essentials, and Forsyth wears that practical, unpretentious approach as a badge of honour.
Forsyth’s reflections on craft are brutally practical. He wrote to tell a story, nothing more. Character, for him, was functional. Plot came first, always. If a scene didn’t move the narrative forward, he cut it. He didn’t agonise over sentences, he made them work. And he didn’t apologise for writing for the masses. If anything, he took pride in it. While writers of literary fiction obsess over nuance and style, Forsyth’s loyalty lay with pace, clarity, and facts. Storytelling, as he saw it, was a job, and he was damn good at it.
