EVERY FREDERICK FORSYTH NOVEL RANKED FROM WORST TO BEST

Having read all of Frederick Forsyth’s fiction qualifies me, I suppose, as a superfan. Thus, I thought I would take this opportunity to rank every Forsyth book (excluding his nonfiction) from worst to best. As a fan, I believe all of Forsyth’s fiction is worth reading. Using the five-star rating system employed by Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, and other online book-review sites, I wouldn’t give any Forsyth book fewer than three stars. But I am grading on a curve here. I am comparing Forsyth books only to other Forsyth books. In general, I’d say a three-star Forsyth novel is better than the best novel by Tom Clancy or Dale Brown or Stephen Coonts, all of whom, like Forsyth, write thrillers that tend to employ military and espionage backgrounds. So I am going to dispense with the five-star system here and employ a three-star system instead. The one-star books are worth reading but seriously flawed. The two-star books have some flaws but are very good. The three-star books are nearly flawless works of genius. Forsyth wrote fourteen novels, two story collections, a collection of connected novellas, and a short story that was published as a standalone book. The two story collections (No Comebacks and The Veteran) are so equal in quality that I have decided to treat all of his short fiction (including the standalone The Shepherd) as though it is a single book, something along the lines of The Complete Short Stories of Frederick Forsyth, a book that doesn’t currently exist but which I would love to see published. Likewise, The Deceiver collects four discrete novellas about a British spymaster named Sam McCready. The novellas were given a unifying framing story so that they could be marketed as a novel. I have no problem with this, so I am treating the book as a novel. My rankings are idiosyncratic and almost certainly don’t align with the conventional wisdom about Forsyth’s books. I’ll warn you now that my summaries will include some spoilers. Let us begin.

The Afghan (2006)

Over the years, I found myself starting and then putting aside several of Forsyth’s novels. The Afghan was one of these. I picked it up again recently only so that I could qualify as a Forsyth completist and write a review of it. I’m glad I did. The concept of The Afghan is a good one. Intelligence experts in Britain and the U.S. learn that the Islamic terrorist group al Qeada is planning a major attack against the west, something codenamed “al-Isra,” a phrase from the Koran. But the experts have no idea where the attack will take place nor what it will consist of. The only way to answer these questions is to somehow embed a spy among the leaders of al Qeada. Only one man in Britain qualifies for the job, Mike Martin, whose mother was from India and whose father was a Brit. Mike has a dark enough complexion to pass as an Arab or an Afghan. He was raised in Iraq and is fluent in various Arabic tongues. Mike was the main character in Forsyth’s 1994 Gulf War thriller The Fist of God, in which he passed himself off as a humble Iraqi gardener. His backstory was given in more detail in that book and Forsyth just seems to assume that readers will be familiar with it. Mike has a gay brother, Terry, who is a British academic and an expert on Arabic culture. Terry has a larger role in The Fist of God, but he also appears in The Afghan. In the pages of The Afghan, Forsyth provides the reader with so little backstory about Mike Martin that he is likely to come across as a complete cipher to anyone who hasn’t read The Fist of God.

At any rate, the powers that be at Britain’s SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) believe that Martin can infiltrate al Qaeda only if he can believably pass himself off as some known martyr to the cause of Islamic extremism. As it happens, a prisoner at the American POW camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba fits the bill exactly. The prisoner is an Afghan named Izmat Khan, a Taliban fighter who was swept up in a military action by the west and sent off to Gitmo, where he has been held in isolation for years for refusing to cooperate with the Americans who have tried to squeeze him for information. To Forsyth’s credit, Khan is portrayed in an almost entirely sympathetic manner. He is not an Islamic extremist. His entire village was destroyed by American bombs. He became an Afghan freedom fighter out of necessity after his entire family was killed. He is a devout man and not a sociopath. What’s more (and this stretches credulity pretty far), he and Mike Martin once spent time together when Martin was in Afghanistan fighting with the British forces there. In fact, Martin saved Khan’s life once and knows things about him that even the British and American authorities don’t know. This is only the first of several eye-rolling coincidences in the book.

The plan that gives the novel its title involves giving Izmat Khan a fake military trial at Gitmo, clearing him of the charges against him, and then sending him back to Afghanistan. But instead of Khan, it will be Mike Martin who returns to Afghanistan, posing as Khan. Khan himself will be shipped off to some super secret U.S. government facility located in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. In order to pass as Khan, Mike Martin must learn a new language, Pashto, and a lot of other things that strain credulity even further. But eventually Forsyth sets up a situation where we now have two men who are generally referred to as The Afghan – Izmat Khan and Mike Martin. By doing so, and by toggling back and forth between their separate stories, he leads the reader to expect that at some point the two Afghans – the fake one and the real one – will meet again in some sort of showdown at the end of the book. Or perhaps they will meet up, rekindle their former friendship, and join up in the fight against Osama Bin Laden (who is an important character in the novel though he remains mostly off stage). And this is one of the book’s many major flaws. That foreshadowed reunion of the two Afghans never materializes. And, in fact, both Afghans disappear for long stretches of the book so that Forsyth can shoehorn in large data dumps about the history of various military invasions of Afghanistan (mainly British and Russian). What’s more, shortly after Martin infiltrates an al Qaeda group in Pakistan, his British spymasters lose track of him. And so, it seems, does Forsyth. Much of the book consists of the various efforts by American and British intelligence experts to locate Martin. At one point, Martin manages to send a message to the Brits (in a fairly unbelievable fashion) warning them that al-Isra will involve some sort of hijacked commercial oceangoing vessel, probably a supertanker or a container ship (shades of The Devil’s Alternative, a much better thriller). And thus a good chunk of the novel details the efforts to locate the ship in question, none of which directly involves either Afghan. When, late in the book, Izmat Khan escapes from his top-secret jail in the Cascade Mountains (thanks to probably the most ridiculous coincidence ever employed in a Forsyth novel), the reader begins to believe that the Afghan will somehow manage to make his way to the Middle East for a showdown, or at least a reunion, with Mike Martin. But it never really happens. Forsyth disposes with the Izmat Khan storyline so abruptly that I couldn’t help wondering why he’d bothered with it to begin with. And by the time Mike Martin returns to the story the reader has nearly forgotten about him as well.

Forsyth had a reason for keeping Martin off stage for much of the novel. It has to do with a major narrative surprise that he has planned for late in the novel. When the surprise comes it is very effective, an enjoyable a-ha moment in which the reader realizes that he has been cleverly tricked for much of the novel. In fact, the last eighty pages or so of the novel are so gripping that the reader winds up with the impression that he has read a really good thriller. But only that final segment is truly compelling. And even it doesn’t bear up to scrutiny. Ordinarily Forsyth is great at making his super-thrillers seem hyper-realistic. But while reading The Afghan I could rarely suspend my disbelief.

Forsyth’s twenty-first century thrillers seem to falter whenever he introduces contemporary computer technology into the plot. Fortunately, there isn’t much of that in The Afghan. Most of his research seems to have involved international commercial maritime shipping. I know nothing about that subject but I came away convinced that Forsyth does. He’s been writing about the subject since at least the 1970s, when he published The Devil’s Alternative. And it is the parts of the novel that deal with commercial shipping that feel the most authentic. Somali pirates didn’t really hit the mainstream pop culture radar until the release of the film Captain Phillips in 2009. So, in that respect at least, Forsyth was once again ahead of his time.

As Forsyth novels go, this one is poor. It reads like a treatment for a really exciting Netflix miniseries. Approach it in that spirit and you’re likely to enjoy it. I did.

The Kill List (2013)

The attacks on the U.S. of September 11, 2001, seem to have reinvigorated Forsyth’s interest in military matters. Almost all of his post 9/11 work has dealt with military or paramilitary efforts to wipe out terrorists. The 9/11 attacks also seem to have triggered in Forsyth a renewed sense of fondness for America and Americans. It’s not as if he was ever anti-American. Like a lot of British spy novelists, Forsyth tends to treat M16’s “American cousins” (i.e. U.S. intelligence operatives) as somewhat foolhardy and patronizing but also brave and reliable. But after 9/11, he seems to have gained a great deal of sympathy for America, as well as a greater appreciation of just how much work goes into trying to defend the country from its many foreign enemies. Defending a relatively small island nation like Great Britain from terrorists is difficult enough. But defending a vast land mass with hundreds of millions of people in it is a great deal more difficult, which probably explains why the CIA relies more heavily on technology than on humint (intelligence gained by human operatives in the field). After 9/11, Forsyth’s thrillers took on a decidedly more friendly tone towards America and its military, its government, and its intelligence services. This is almost the exact opposite of what happened with the fiction of John Le Carre. After 9/11, some of his novels became anti-American screeds. Reviewing Absolute Friends (2004), Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times wrote: “Absolute Friends, John Le Carre’s ham-handed and didactic new novel is…a clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message-novel meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order. The plot has been constructed to illustrate this message, and it not only feels hastily jerry-built but ridiculously contrived as well.”

Le Carre was a longtime political liberal; Forsyth a longtime conservative. Both wrote plenty of brilliant novels. But 9/11 seemed to bring out the worst in Le Carre’s work. For Forsyth, however, 9/11 inspired a late career renaissance. His final five novels are not the best he ever wrote. Some are as ridiculously contrived as Absolute Friends. But all of those novels are filled with excitement and action. His American characters often seem even more admirable than his British ones. He slips in an editorial comment every now and then, but none of these comments are as tedious and self-righteous as the op-eds that can be found in Le Carre’s final fictions.

In The Kill List we once again have a protagonist possessed of almost supernatural skills in the art of finding and killing international terrorists. This hero’s name is Kit Carson, but that name (thankfully) is rarely used in the novel. Forsyth tells us that, when his parents gave Kit that name, “the reference to the old frontiersman was entirely coincidental.” Sure. Carson uses a few different aliases when he is on the trail of a villain, but Forsyth usually just refers to him as the Tracker (the real Kit Carson, of course, was a famous tracker). In fact, most of the important characters in the book are known primarily by nicknames. The villain is called the Preacher. He is an Islamic terrorist who uses the internet to broadcast hateful Islamic sermons to his followers and urge them to commit acts of terrorism on the West, particularly Great Britain and the U.S. (Forsyth admirably points out that the Preacher’s understanding of Islam is a complete – and intentional – misreading of the Prophet Mohammad). As the names – Preacher, Tracker, etc. – imply, the characters in this book are mainly just cardboard stand-ins for various character traits: villainy, doggedness, etc. This is a flaw of most of Forsyth’s late-career novels.

The Kill List, like The Afghan, is a one-star novel but it is nonetheless a slightly better book. In The Kill List Forsyth wisely keeps his focus mainly on Kit Carson. The book feels more like a novel and less like a history lesson. As usual, Forsyth organizes some nifty narrative surprises and provides the reader with plenty of violent action sequences. It’s not a great novel but I never felt like putting it aside. In fact, I devoured it in a few days.

The Phantom of Manhattan (1999)

My guess is that virtually every other Forsyth completist would rank this novel as his worst. On Goodreads it is far and away his lowest rated novel, with rating of 3.01 stars out of five. His second lowest rated book is The Afghan, with a rating of 3.75. The impetus for this book came from composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, a friend of Forsyth’s since the 1970s. Webber wanted to create a sequel to his incredibly popular 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera, which was based on Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel of the same name. He approached Forsyth to see if the novelist might be interested in writing the story. Forsyth wrote a story but Webber largely ignored it when writing Love Never Dies, his 2010 sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. Not wanting to waste his story outline, Forsyth turned it into this novel. The readers who have trashed this book on Goodreads have a point. Many of them mention the pompous and self-serving preface in which Forsyth trashes Leroux as a third-rate writer who lucked upon a clever old folk tale and became the first writer to expand it into a novel. Roughly the same thing happened to the authors of Frankenstein and Dracula, Forsyth tells us, but the authors of those novels had much more talent than Leroux and thus their names have become widely known. Forsyth seems to suggest that Leroux’s version of Phantom isn’t very good and that it is largely because of Webber that the story is still widely popular. He also suggests that Leroux didn’t really understand his material and thus mishandled it, a mistake Forsyth promises not to make in his sequel. Forsyth employs a handful of different first-person narrators to take up the original story after the Phantom has fled from Paris and secretly taken up residence in Manhattan, where he plans to build a glorious opera house in order to indulge his own well-known obsessions.

Back in 1999, I was so disappointed by The Phantom of Manhattan that I gave up on Forsyth’s fiction for several years afterwards. But, gradually, I developed a sort of grudging appreciation for it. This is Forsyth’s only true historical novel. Most of his novels are set in eras only a decade or so removed from the time of their writing. The Day of the Jackal and the Odessa File were both set in the early sixties and published in the early seventies. The Phantom of Manhattan is set in 1906. The gothic romance is not Forsyth’s natural milieu. At roughly 260 pages, it is Forsyth’s shortest novel. And the book is set almost entirely in America, another first for Forsyth. Though I agree that the book isn’t terribly successful, I now find myself admiring the fact that he was willing to break from his comfort zone so late in his highly successful career. The book is a noble failure. It’s easily the least typical of his novels, and as such I found it a bit more interesting than some of the more typical novels that came later, even though those books were more successfully executed (just barely, in the case of The Afghan).

The biggest problem for Forsyth is that his novel was published just nine years after Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is not only the most successful spin-off of Leroux’s original but probably the best single pop-cultural product ever to emerge from the franchise. It has been reviewed by more than 12,000 readers at Goodreads and holds a phenomenal 4.33 percent approval rating, higher than any Forsyth novel (although The Day of the Jackal is close, at 4.27). It won the 1991 Best Novel Award presented by Britain’s Romantic Novelists’ Association. It was also a winner of the Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize. It was one of the best pop fictions to come out of the 1990s and had it been written by a novelist with Forsyth’s stature it would almost certainly be as well known today as The Day of Jackal.

The Fox (2018)

In his final novel, he gives us a title character (Luke Jennings, codenamed the Fox) who is a young computer wizard who uses his skills to wreak havoc on foreign despots in Russia and Iran and North Korea. Making his title character a computer wiz was an unfortunate choice because Forsyth appears to know little about computers. Although I am twenty years younger than Forsyth, I too am an old man and completely ignorant of computers. But even I found myself rolling my eyes at some of the magical things The Fox was able to do with computers.

Considering how badly Forsyth botches the technical details in The Fox, you might be surprised by the fact that it managed to earn even 3.8 stars from the Goodreads crowd. That slightly-above-average rating is a testament to Forsyth’s other storytelling gifts. Even when his computer knowledge fails him, he knows how to set up exciting action sequences. Both Russia and Iran send secret hit squads after Luke Jennings, and Forsyth creates some great suspense as British forces try to neutralize them before they can kill the Fox. I enjoyed the novel and found its 336 pages flying by. The novel doesn’t come close to matching such masterpieces as The Day of Jackal, The Odessa File, or The Fourth Protocol, but it isn’t really trying to. The book seems to be written for fans of the Jason Bourne films and the Mission: Impossible franchise. It is lightweight and frothy in the manner of a silly action movie. If you approach it the way you would a James Bond film, you’re not likely to go away disappointed.

The Cobra (2010)

The Cobra, published in 2010, was the twelfth of Frederick Forsyth’s fourteen novels. Although not quite up to the standards of the novels he produced in the 1970s and 1980s, The Cobra is nonetheless a thrilling adventure novel. Like a lot of Forsyth’s books, it is something of a right-wing fantasy in which a team of noble pragmatists decide to ignore such niceties as civil rights and judicial procedure and simply go out and destroy an enemy of the Western world, in this case a South American cocaine cartel. Curiously, this group of extra-judicial warriors is brought into existence by none other than U.S. President Barack Obama. The President calls in Paul Devereaux (aka the Cobra), an ex-CIA operative known for going outside the law in order to try to bring justice to monsters such as Slobodan Milosevic and Osama bin Laden. Obama asks Devereaux to put together a plan for eradicating the Colombian cartel that produces much of the cocaine that makes its way into America. Devereaux goes away and spends six months reading everything he can about illegal cocaine trafficking. He puts together a plan and asks the President to supply him with a few billion dollars, a couple of seaworthy cargo vessels, a team of Navy Seals, and sundry other items. He also asks the President to secure him the cooperation of the British government. The British, like the Americans, provide Devereaux with an array of military and civilian assistants ready to do whatever he needs. Needless to say, all of what Devereaux plans to do is illegal and the two governments will disavow any knowledge of his actions if he or any of his team get caught. Devereaux brings on board as his right-hand man, Cal Dexter. Dexter and Devereaux were introduced seven years earlier in Forsyth’s 2003 novel Avenger, probably Forsyth’s last truly great thriller. The two men were working against each other in that novel. In The Cobra they are united in an effort to destroy the worldwide cocaine market.

The book is marred, again, by Forsyth’s tendency to ascribe almost magical powers to computer technology and his relative inability (or lack of interest in) describing the specifics of that technology. Fortunately, the book is also full of information about aviation, a subject that Forsyth, a former RAF pilot, knows intimately. If The Cobra been written by any other contemporary thriller writer, it would probably be a career highlight. It isn’t vintage Forsyth but even second-tier Forsyth is worth seeking out if you are a fan of adventure fiction.

The Dogs of War (1974)

This was the last of Forsyth’s monster bestsellers of the 1970s. Both The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File managed to land on two of Publishers Weekly’s year-end lists of the bestselling novels in America, a nearly unheard of accomplishment at the time. Jackal was the fourth bestselling novel of both 1971 and 1972. Odessa was the third bestselling novel of 1972 and the fourth bestselling novel of 1973. The Dogs of War was the sixth bestselling novel of 1974. This is one of Forsyth’s most highly regarded novels. It is a story about a British business mogul who hires European mercenaries to topple the dictator of a fictional African nation called Zangaro. The dictator, Jean Kimba, is brutal and evil, but that’s not why Sir James Manson wants him deposed. A mineral expert hired by Manson has discovered that a remote region of Zangaro possesses a vast wealth of platinum beneath its surface. Manson wants to kill the dictator and install in his place some figurehead who will allow Manson to exploit the country’s mineral resources for his own personal profit. Forsyth spent a lot of time in Biafra as a reporter in the 1960s. He knew this milieu well. And The Dogs of War may be his best-researched and most authentic novel. It was also one of his best-reviewed novels. His first two novels tended to be treated as mere thrillers by serious critics. The Dogs of War was treated as a serious critique of both Capitalism and European colonialism. Alas, it is almost too well researched. Most Forsyth novels tend to be chock full of data on a variety of subjects. And he sometimes inserts this information in ways that aren’t especially artistic. For me, The Dogs of War is bogged down by too much research on subjects such as Swiss banking and industrial mineral extraction. Here’s a typical paragraph:

Platinum is a metal and, like all metals, it has its price. The price is basically controlled by two factors. These are the indispensability of the metal in certain processes that the industries of the world would like to complete, and the rarity of the metal. Platinum is very rare. Total world production each year, apart from stockpiled production, which is kept secret by the producers, is a shade over one and a half million Troy ounces.

That paragraph is followed by three much longer paragraphs in the same vein (no pun intended). They are filled with facts and figures (“Russia releases on the world each year about 350,000 Troy ounces out of the 1,500,000 that reach the same market.”). Reading these passages is like reading a specialty magazine aimed at the mining industry, which is probably where Forsyth got his info. The book contains, as one Goodreads reviewer put it: “At least 200 pages worth of logistics, money transfers, budgeting, letter writing, postage rates, telephone calls, and issuing of shares.” The novel has an impressive 3.99 rating on Goodreads, but it seems to be the one Forsyth novel that most divides his hardcore fandom, with some considering it his masterpiece and others, like me, thinking that it is weighed down by his effort to shoehorn every scrap of his research into its pages. I believe the fact that this was the weakest performer of his first three novels (based on sales) supports the naysayers. Both Jackal and Odessa had their data dumps, but The Dogs of War is essentially one large data dump. Only in its last 100 pages or so does it become a thriller. I rate it among his one-star books.

The Fist of God (1994)

Despite the misstep that was The Phantom of Manhattan, the 1990s were a pretty good decade for Forsyth. In 1994 he produced The Fist of God. Two years later he produced Icon. My paperback editions of these books are both approximately 570 pages long, making them, by my count, his two longest novels. The mid-1990s marks the only time Forsyth ever published over a thousand pages of fiction in a three-year span. Both books must have been written as the real-life events that inspired them were unspooling, or just shortly afterwards. The Fist of God deals with the Persian Gulf War, which concluded in 1991. In order for Forsyth to have published a massive novel set during the war just three years later, he almost certainly had to have been working on it even before the conclusion of the war. Likewise, Icon deals with the aftermath of the fall of U.S.S.R. and how various demagogues and gangsters and careerists took advantage of that fall to enrich themselves and gain power in Russia during the 1990s. The Fist of God and Icon are both two-star novels.

This is the novel that first introduced the Martin brothers, Mike and Terry, who would return later (with slightly altered backstories) in The Afghan. Mike Martin once again disguises himself as a Middle Easterner in order to try to get close to a dangerous regime, in this case Sadaam Hussein’s inner circle. A lot of Forsyth novels introduce a somewhat bewildering array of characters in their early chapters and then, cleverly and gradually, whittle this number down over the course of many pages until, by about the midpoint of the story, it becomes clear that he is building up to a showdown between just two characters, the protagonist and the primary villain. The villain isn’t usually the book’s most famous bad guy, such as Sadaam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, but usually some fictional character who acts as a surrogate for them. The Fist of God eventually narrows into a battle of wits between Mike Martin and one Hussein’s top advisors. That at least is the main story. The novel, like most others by Forsyth, has plenty of subplots.

Icon (1996)

Forsyth tends to be fairly prescient where world events are concerned. Even before 9/11 he was writing about the threat of the Taliban. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, a lot of observers thought that Russia might soon become a fledgling democracy and begin to embrace some of the tenets of Capitalism. And, as a result, her former enemies would enjoy a so-called “peace dividend,” a huge influx of money now that the U.S. and her allies no longer had to devote so much of their budgets to Cold War priorities. Forsyth knew that this would never happen. He also knew that the chaos that was Russia in the 1990s would likely prove to be an ideal breeding ground for a ruthless demagogic dictator. Icon didn’t exactly predict the rise of Vladimir Putin to prominence on the world stage, but it came very close. It is interesting to compare this novel with Martin Cruz Smith’s 1982 novel Gorky Park. Both are thoroughly researched and authoritative. Smith notes that Moscow had almost no criminal gangs in the late 1970s and that few Muscovites owned guns. By the 1990s, in Icon, Moscow is awash with both gangsters and guns. The difference is stark. Icon makes Russia look even more frightening than Gorky Park did.

The hero of Icon is Jason Monk, who is essentially an American version of Mike Martin. Just as Martin is pulled out of retirement in The Afghan to go on one last highly-dangerous undercover mission, Jason Monk, at the beginning of Icon, is an ex-CIA agent who is now running a charter-boat service on an island in the Bahamas. Martin was an expert on the Middle East who spoke perfect Arabic. Monk is an expert on Russia who speaks perfect Russian. British and American intelligence agencies are worried by the rise of a Russian politician named Igor Komarov, a virulent racist and fascist who appears poised to win an upcoming Presidential election. They bribe/threaten Monk out of retirement and send him to Russia with instructions to do his best to sabotage Komarov’s presidential bid. The book features a huge cast of characters but eventually it narrows down to a battle between Monk and Colonel Grishin, an ex-KGB officer and Komarov’s right-hand butcher. This much of the story is gripping and exciting. Alas, Forsyth also uses the novel in order to pursue a personal vendetta. As an ex-British spy, Forsyth seems to personally resent the fact that the most famous western traitors of the twentieth century were British agents turned Soviet moles, Kim Philby and the other members of the so-called Cambridge Five. Thus, he seems to have been positively delighted when, in 1994, CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames was exposed as a longtime Russian spy and arrested and charged with treason. Forsyth uses much of his novel to argue (convincingly) that Ames did more damage to western intelligence services than any other turncoat of the twentieth century.

It seems likely that the composition of Icon was probably pretty far along at the time of Ames’s arrest. My guess is that the novel was originally intended to focus simply on what Forsyth thought would become of Russia by the year 1999 (when the book is set). But the arrest of Ames appears to have inspired him to use the book as a cudgel with which to beat up on American intelligence services as a way of paying them back for years of having withheld information from Britain after the exposure of the Cambridge Five. In The Afghan, he writes, “There have been spats [between the British and American intelligence communities], especially over the rash of British traitors starting with Philby, Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Then the Americans became aware they, too, had a whole rogues gallery of traitors working for Moscow, and the interagency sniping stopped.” But The Afghan wasn’t published until 2006. In 1996 Forsyth still felt like rubbing a little dirt in America’s face. I don’t blame him for it, but I think Icon suffers for it. It would have been a leaner and better thriller if he had ditched the Aldrich Ames subplot and focused on his fictional characters.

Both The Fist of God and Icon were novels that I lost interest in early and put aside. Years later, I picked them up and started from the beginning and read them straight through to the end. I think the effort to front-load both novels with timely stuff – Gulf War details in Fist, Aldrich Ames details in Icon – weakens both books. But both books had me firmly hooked well before the halfway point. And I can’t imagine anyone putting down either book during the final two hundred pages or so. No writer I know of consistently brings his thrillers to a more satisfying conclusion than Forsyth. These are both two-star books (out of a possible three stars).

The Devil’s Alternative (1979)

This book began life as a film script. But when the movie deal fell through, Forsyth went ahead and adapted it as a novel. I have to believe that the story took on much more heft and depth in the transition from script to novel, because the novel is incredibly dense, filled with far more characters and incidents than could ever be dealt with in a Hollywood film of two hours or so. Hollywood’s decision to pass on the script was probably the best thing that could have happened to the story. The Devil’s Alternative is a three-star book. It was the eighth bestselling novel in America for the year 1980. This is the first Forsyth novel in which ocean going commercial vessels would figure prominently. They would later play big roles in both The Cobra and The Afghan and minor roles in other books. The novel is also newly timely because it deals with the hostilities between Russia and Ukraine.

The story concerns the hijacking of a massive oil tanker, which is seized by terrorists somewhere between the coastlines of Holland and Scotland. The terrorists are threatening to blow up the tanker and create an unprecedented environmental disaster for the region if two Ukrainian freedom fighters who assassinated the director of the KGB are not released from the West German jail in which they have been confined since they hijacked an airplane and escaped the Soviet bloc. This is not a simple good-guys-vs-bad-guys story. The Ukrainian freedom fighters are very sympathetic characters. Even the men who have seized the supertanker are relatively sympathetic. They are all enemies of the Soviet Union and thus are in sympathy with most of Forsyth’s own political beliefs. Alas, they have created an almost impossible situation for themselves and for the politicians who must deal with them. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are on the brink of signing an historic nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The Soviet Premier insists that he will scrap the treaty if the Ukrainian terrorists are not returned to Russia (where they will surely be tortured and killed). The West Germans would gladly hand the terrorists over to the Soviets but now they are under pressure from the British and the Dutch not to do so, for fear of unleashing an environmental nightmare. Because the two Ukrainians are Jewish, Israel is willing to take them from the West Germans but the Soviets would never allow that to happen.

Some people tend to view geopolitics in simplistic terms (“Give Ireland back to the Irish.” “From the river to the sea.” “No more settler colonialism.”). Forsyth has always known that the real world is much more complex than that. The two Ukrainian assassins had good motivations for killing the KGB’s murderous leader. And the hijackers who seized the tanker have a sympathetic motive also – the release from prison of two men who want to bring down the U.S.S.R. But the leaders of Western Europe and America must look at the big picture. To them, a treaty with the Soviets is more important than the lives of two political prisoners. But can they really afford to allow the terrorists to spill millions of gallons of oil into the North Sea? This is one of Forsyth’s twistiest stories. It begins with a cast of dozens of players but, as is his wont, the author eventually tightens the focus and turns it into a battle of wits between two of his main characters. This is a wholly satisfying novel with only a few spots where Forsyth allows his surfeit of research to show. The characters may not be as fully fleshed as those you might find in a Le Carre novel but neither are they the cardboard cutouts of The Cobra or The Kill List. This is a three-star novel, as are all the remaining novels on this list.

Avenger (2003)

Published in 2003, this is the best of Forsyth’s twenty-first century novels and his last truly great thriller. The plot was designed to illustrate the need for CIA agents to deal with small-fry thugs in order to bring down much larger thugs. The set-up is ingenious. As the novel opens, Calvin Dexter, a lawyer and former U.S. Army “tunnel rat,” is offered a job by a Canadian billionaire named Stephen Edmonds. Several years earlier Edmonds’s eighteen-year-old grandson had volunteered to travel to Bosnia and help out the innocent civilian victims of the Bosnian War (which lasted from 1992 to 1995). The boy disappeared in Bosnia and his grandfather wants to know how and why. Dexter travels to Bosnia and engages in some thrilling detective work. Eventually he learns that the grandson was killed in gruesome fashion by a sadistic Serbian warlord named Zilic. The grandfather wants Dexter – aka “Avenger” – to track down Zilic and make him pay for his crime – extra-judicially, of course. In early 2001, Dexter begins tracking Zilic to the Central American compound where he now lives comfortably thanks to the CIA, which has bought him off because of the intelligence he has delivered on other villains. As Dexter is closing in on Zilic, he doesn’t know that Zilic is in the process of helping the CIA nab a particularly nefarious terrorist named Osama bin Laden. Zilic and bin Laden are acquaintances and Zilic is setting up a meeting with the Saudi Arabian terrorist at which CIA agents will be waiting to kill or capture him. Naturally all of this is happening in the late summer of 2001. Thus the reader finds his loyalties curiously mixed. We’ve waited all book long for a showdown between Dexter and Zilic, a showdown in which Dexter delivers to Zilic the kind of painful retribution he deserves for what he did to Stephen Edmonds’s grandson and plenty of other victims. But at the same time, we’d love to see Osama bin Laden caught or killed before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks can be carried out. So we find ourselves both rooting for Zilic’s death, and yet still hoping that Dexter fails so that Zilic can help deliver a much bigger villain into the hands of the CIA.

This is another rightwing fantasy novel which argues that the niceties of civil rights law and proscriptions against unwarranted searches and extrajudicial terminations of terrorists have made the world less safe for Western democracies. Forsyth clearly believes that the U.S., Great Britain, and their allies should be empowering super soldiers (U.S. Navy Seals and Green Berets, British Special Forces, etc.) to go after Islamic terrorists, Columbian drug lords, Russian dictators, and other evildoers unfettered by laws and international norms. To say the least, this is a somewhat simplistic philosophy and utterly at odds with Forsyth’s earlier books, which seemed to argue that the geopolitics of the contemporary world are far too complex for simple solutions. Having witnessed the rise to bestsellerdom of Tom Clancy and others of his ilk, however, Forsyth seems to have adopted the attitude: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

The Day of the Jackal (1971)

This is easily Forsyth’s best-known book and one of the most influential popular novels of the twentieth century. The story, about an attempt to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle in 1963, is widely known. In 1973, the book received an excellent film adaptation by director Fred Zinnemann. Just as Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic romance, Rebecca, became the template for nearly every subsequent book in that genre, The Day of the Jackal became a template for nearly every subsequent novel and film about assassination. Forsyth certainly didn’t invent the assassination thriller, but he brought it close to perfection. The years after Jackal’s publication brought us a slew of similar titles, such as Richard Condon’s Winter Kill, Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction, Steven King’s The Dead Zone, and Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity. Even today, the novel continues to be influential. David Fincher’s most recent film, 2023’s Killer, bears a strong resemblance to Jackal. The 2010 action thriller The American, starring George Clooney, is also indebted to Jackal. And a method of obtaining false identity papers which was first used in Jackal has become so commonplace in thriller fiction that it now has its own name: The Day of the Jackal fraud. It was used as recently as 2023 in the Netflix series Who Is Erin Carter?

So, why isn’t it number one on this list? Jackal is a first novel written by a former journalist, and, as with The Dogs of War, the writing can sometimes be a bit dry and the characterizations a bit rote. These are far from fatal flaws. In fact, they are probably not flaws at all. Forsyth’s matter-of-fact delivery was almost certainly the best way for this story to be told, seeing as how it seemed to aspire to the authenticity of a documentary film. Jackal may be Forsyth’s most perfectly realized novel. Nonetheless, I found it slightly less involving than some of his later, more hot-blooded novels. Anyone who seeks to be well-versed in the popular fiction of the twentieth century needs to be familiar with The Day of the Jackal. Just as Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon kicked off a vogue for serial killer fiction that remains vibrant to this day, and Scott Turow’s 1987 novel Presumed Innocent kicked off a vogue for legal thrillers that remains vibrant to this day, The Day of the Jackal kicked off a vogue for thrillers about highly trained assassins that remains vibrant to this day.

The Odessa File (1972)

The Day of the Jackal is about a fictional bad guy trying to bring down a real-life good guy (relatively speaking). The Odessa File is about a fictional good guy trying to bring down a real-life bad guy. The protagonist is crusading German journalist Peter Miller. The bad guy is real-life Nazi Eduard Roschmann, known as The Butcher of Riga, because of the mass murders he authorized and oversaw in Latvia during World War II. Like Jackal, this was a hugely influential book and it kicked off a vogue for books about Nazis still roaming free in the post-WWII west. Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, William Goldman’s The Marathon Man, Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant, Stephen King’s Apt Pupil, Brian Moore’s The Statement – a great number of novels about the Nazis still among us were published in the aftermath of The Odessa File. The book is also a classic example of the so-called “false-document thriller,” a book that makes liberal use of reproduced birth certificates, passport pages, newspaper articles, diary entries, etc. Stephen King used it in Carrie, whose chapters all begin with newspaper clippings. Jack Higgins employed it notably in The Eagle Has Landed, a book that owes a debt to both Odessa and Jackal. Forsyth would use it many times, most prominently in Icon, which revolves around a document known as the Black Manuscript, a Russian presidential candidate’s secret plan for eliminating Russia’s racial minorities.

In addition to being a great thriller, The Odessa File is also a sort of travelogue through 1960s West Germany, shortly after the advent of the Iron Curtain. As usual, the book is filled with odd facts, such as an explanation of the difference between the shock absorbers used on British cars and those used on German cars. This can sometimes grow a bit wearying, but Odessa contains less of it than either Jackal or Dogs of War. This is one of Forsyth’s least didactic and most entertaining works.

The Negotiator (1989)

Most pop-fiction historians would probably argue that the 1970s were Forsyth’s Golden Era. It’s hard to argue that a decade that brought us Jackal, Odessa, The Dogs of War, and The Devil’s Alternative was anything less than a Golden Era for Forsyth’s fiction. But I’m going to argue it anyway. I believe that Forsyth’s best work was done in the 1980s. His earlier work suffered slightly from his tendency to write in journalese. His later work suffered slightly from his willingness to indulge his wildest rightwing fantasies. By the 1980s, he was a full-fledged novelist, comfortable with dialog and character development and introspection. But he also still maintained his belief that the world was a complicated place and that no particular philosophy or political tribe had a monopoly on the truth. His books of the 1980s were his most novelistic and complex. His 1989 novel, The Negotiator, is one of his best. It marked Forsyth’s first use of a device that he would deploy several more times in later novels, wherein an expert in some field is dragged out of retirement to spearhead one more vitally important project (Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon seems to have kicked off the vogue for this particular formula in mid-twentieth century pop fiction). In this case the expert is an American ex-Green Beret, known simply as Quinn, who was once widely regarded as the world’s leading hostage negotiator but has since retired to the coast of Spain. When Simon Cormack, the son of a U.S. President, is kidnapped while studying abroad, Quinn is persuaded to come out of retirement to try to negotiate the young man’s safe release. Naturally, things get a lot more complicated from there. Prior to the publication of this book, fictional hostage negotiators almost always treated hostage takers with kid gloves so as not to trigger any sort of violence against the hostage(s). Even when the negotiators knew they were dealing with violent criminals, they kept their voices respectful and tried to treat all demands, no matter how far-fetched, as reasonable starting points for discussion. Forsyth demonstrates why this tactic is often unadvisable. Quinn doesn’t treat Simon Cormack’s kidnappers with respect or even condescension. He lets them know from his very first telephone conversation with them that he disdains them and that he will be setting the terms for the negotiations and, hopefully, the eventual release of Simon. When they try to argue with him, he hangs up on them. This unconventional approach to hostage negotiation came as a delicious surprise to readers back in 1989. Like a lot of other Forsyth touches, it has since been copied many times. Mel Gibson’s character in Ron Howard’s 1996 film Ransom employs a similar approach. In the third episode of the British crime drama Professor T, Ben Miller’s title character employs a similar approach when negotiating with a ring of kidnappers and jewel thieves. But it was Forsyth who first popularized the hostile negotiator trope and no one has ever done it better than he did in The Negotiator.

The Fourth Protocol (1984)

As good as it is, The Negotiator was the least impressive of the three books of fiction Forsyth published in the 1980s. His best novel of that decade was The Fourth Protocol, which details an attempt by the Soviets to assemble a small nuclear bomb in Britain and then detonate it near an American airbase. The Soviets are hoping that the British will assume that the nuclear bomb belonged to the Americans and exploded accidentally. This, the Soviets hope, might inspire the British government to expel all American military forces from the U.K. Obviously they cannot sneak an entire nuclear weapon into England unnoticed. But a tactical nuclear weapon can be constructed out of a small number of parts, each of which can be disguised to look like something innocuous and smuggled separately into England, where it can be assembled by Valeri Petrofsky, a Russian agent in England who has no trouble passing him self off as a Brit.

Some fans of the genre say that every good thriller needs a ticking clock, a hard-and-fast deadline of some sort that will bring about disaster if it isn’t averted before then. The trick, for novelists and filmmakers, is to find some sort of physical analog that illustrates the rapidly approaching deadline. The Fourth Protocol employs a rather clever ticking-clock device. Each time a Russian courier delivers another seemingly innocuous component of the nuclear bomb to Petrofsky, Forsyth ends the section with a sentence that reads, “Courier Three [or Four, or Five, or whatever] had delivered.” Naturally, as each new component arrives safely inside British territory the reader’s concern grows more intense.

The Washington Post called The Fourth Protocol “Forsyth’s finest.” The Christian Science Monitor called it, “The most fascinating spy novel since The Little Drummer Girl.” The Fourth Protocol was the seventh bestselling novel in America for 1984. Never again would Forsyth land a novel on the year-end list of the ten bestselling fictions in America. The Negotiator would manage to reach the number thirteen spot on the 1987 list. But after the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union, the American reading public’s enthusiasm for espionage and espionage-adjacent fiction waned for a decade or more. Forsyth continued to hit the New York Times’ weekly bestseller lists but, after the 1980s, he would never be the mega-bestselling author he was in first two decades as a novelist.

The Collected Short Fiction of Frederick Forsyth (?)

Alas, this book doesn’t exist yet, though I keep hoping. Forsyth published his first collection of short stories, No Comebacks, in 1982. Not one of the ten stories in the book is a clunker. Most are just as entertaining and twisty as his novels, but a lot shorter. His second collection, The Veteran, was published in the year 2001. Most of these stories are longer than the ones in No Comeback and should probably be categorized as novellas. In any case, both collections are excellent. In fact, for an author famous for fairly fat novels, Forsyth is a wizard with the short story. He writes short fiction in the tradition of Saki (H.H. Munro), O. Henry (William Sidney Porter), Roald Dahl, John Collier, Shirley Jackson, and other masters of the commercial short story with a twist in its tale. His best-known story, The Shepherd, was published as a standalone illustrated book in 1975. It is a Christmas tale and has been adapted for the radio on several occasions and was also the source of short 2023 film starring John Travolta. All together, these three books contain sixteen stories that deserve to be collected in an authoritative complete edition. They include fantasy tales, military tales, a Western, crime stories, espionage tales, and even a terrific fishing yarn. If they were collected in a single edition, they would constitute, in my opinion, the second best of Forsyth’s many books of fiction.

The Deceiver (1991)

Though published in the early 1990s, this collection of four novellas about British spymaster Sam McCready should probably be categorized as a work from the 1980s, because the novellas are novelizations of stories that Forsyth wrote for a British TV series called Frederick Forsyth Presents, which debuted in 1989. It appears that the stories were all written before Forsyth approached London Weekend Television in 1988 with the idea of turning them into a limited TV series. Curiously, the TV series comprised six episodes, but only four of them are included in The Deceiver. As noted earlier, though it collects four standalone novellas (with an average length of about 115 pages each) the book was marketed as a novel and can certainly be consumed that way. Each novella is preceded by a very brief introductory story that links it to the others. Almost any other commercial novelist would probably have padded out these novellas and turned them into standalone novels. Forsyth generously consigned them all to a single book. And, as with his story collections, there isn’t a single weak link here. Every one of them is thrilling and intelligent and cleverly wrought. On its own, none of these would be able to challenge The Fourth Protocol as Forsyth’s best novel, but taken together as a single four-part tale of the spying game they are unbeatable.

Sam McCready is no James Bond. He’s a rumpled, middle-aged bureaucrat who has more in common with TV’s Lt. Columbo than with the superspies of the Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne franchises. As the book opens, Parliament is considering cutting back on its expenditures for the British intelligence services. With the Soviet Union about to crumble, it seems that spymasters like McCready will soon be less necessary. But before the secret committee weighing McCready’s fate can make a ruling it will hear from four different people who believe that McCready should be kept on in his current position. Each person’s testimony constitutes one of the tales in this book. And each one is a corker.

Forsyth, who is superb at writing both short stories and novels, seems to be at his best in this hybrid of the two forms. The shortness of the form tempers his tendency to pump too much research into his novels, but the fact that he doesn’t have to wrap things up after only thirty or forty pages gives him breathing room that he lacks in his short stories. All of Forsyth’s books are worth seeking out. But page for page, The Deceiver is, in my opinion, the most entertaining of the lot.