FREDERICK FORSYTH'S FINAL FICTIONS
(Note: This examination of Frederick Forsyth’s fiction contains numerous spoilers and is intended mainly for those who are familiar with his work. Read with caution.)
Frederick Forsyth is 85 years old, and I hope he lives to see his one-hundredth birthday. But whether he dies at 86 or 106, I have a feeling that the obituaries in mainstream publications will sum up his career in roughly the same fashion. Any fair accounting of his career will have to note that The Day of the Jackal, published in the summer of 1971, was one of the greatest – and most influential – thrillers of the twentieth century. Details from Forsyth’s novel were borrowed countless times in other books, TV shows, and films of the 1970s and beyond. One such detail involves the acquisition of a fake identity and has come to be known as the “Day of the Jackal fraud,” because it has appeared in so many fictions and has been attempted with various degrees of success by numerous real-life fraudsters. It involves visiting a graveyard and finding the tombstone of a dead person who was born close to your own birth date. Armed with this person’s name and date of birth, you then visit the local hall of records, give them the fake name and birth date, claim that they are yours, and then inform the clerk that you have lost your original birth certificate and would like to obtain a copy. Armed with this birth certificate, you can then go out and acquire a fake driver license, a fake passport, fake credit cards, etc. Modern technology has mostly rendered this ruse obsolete, but at the time that Jackal was published, it was an ingenious and brilliantly effective way of obtaining a false identity. And it remains such a clever-seeming device that even contemporary thrillers, somewhat anachronistically, still employ it. Most recently it was used in the NetFlix series Who Is Erin Carter?, which was released on August 24, 2023, the day after Forsyth’s 85th birthday and almost exactly fifty-two years after the American publication of The Day of the Jackal. Even Jason Bourne, the protagonist of Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel The Bourne Identity (and numerous subsequent novels and films) employed a variation on the Day of the Jackal fraud.
Prior to Jackal, most crime writers didn’t bother to make themselves experts on guns. The weapons their fictional killers used were generally just described as pistols or revolvers or rifles or Derringers or Smith & Wessons – you name it. But Forsyth’s assassin needed a special weapon, a rifle that would be accurate at long range but which could be broken down into small parts and shipped in a suitcase that no one would suspect contained a rifle. The Day of the Jackal goes into great detail about how the gun is designed and bored and assembled and stabilized and so forth. Later, this kind of almost fetishistic detail about guns would become more commonplace, found in the novels of great crime writers like Stephen Hunter and Lee Childs, and in countless movies, such as The American, a 2010 action film in which George Clooney portrays a Jackal-like assassin. But that kind of attention to gun construction was fairly rare prior to The Day of the Jackal.
The book was so well detailed that several real-life assassins and would-be assassins studied it obsessively while planning their murders.
After Jackal was published, books about assassination attempts on famous historical figures like Hitler and Roosevelt and Stalin began to proliferate. Naturally, novels about political assassination weren’t completely unknown before the publication of Jackal. And after the real-life assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they began to take on a new urgency. But the success of Jackal (whose story is set in 1963, the year of Kennedy’s assassination) seems to have generated a renewal of popularity for this type of intrigue, and the subsequent years brought us many memorable novels that combined politics and murder, books such as James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (whose title seems to intentionally beg for comparison with Jackal), Richard Condon’s Winter Kills, Loren Singer’s The Parallax View, and Adam Kennedy’s The Domino Principle – all of which were published in 1974 or 1975, which suggests that they might have been inspired by the same source. And, considering how long it takes to write and then bring a complex novel to market, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that all four of these authors began work on their books sometime in the latter half of 1971, probably after having read Jackal.
At any rate, after mentioning Jackal, Forsyth’s obituaries are likely to also heap praise upon the novels that immediately followed it, 1972’s The Odessa File, and 1974’s The Dogs of War, both of which, like Jackal, were massive bestsellers. In fact, Jackal and Odessa both achieved the almost impossible feat of landing on Publishers Weekly’s list of the ten-bestselling books in America two years in a row. 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 Odessa File, which was inspired in part by Simon Wiesenthal’s decades-long effort to track down escaped Nazi Eduardo Roschmann, was nearly as influential as Jackal. Thrillers about Nazis had been a staple of English-language pop-fiction since even before the end of World War II. They proliferated like crazy after the war. Most of these were either straight-forward adventure stories set during the 1930s and 40s, or historical novels – like John Hersey’s The Wall and Leon Uris’s Mila 18 – which dealt in a realistic fashion with the suffering brought about by the Nazi occupations of Poland, Denmark, The Netherlands, etc. The Odessa File was something else, something a little more disturbing to pop-fiction readers of the 1970s. It was a story about those Nazis who still dwelt among us. Forsyth made it clear that there were high-ranking Nazis living in exile under assumed names everywhere – South America, North America, Egypt, even in Spain and France and other European countries. The years after the publication of The Odessa File brought us a lot of variations on the same theme, including William Goldman’s 1974 thriller The Marathon Man, Ira Levin’s 1976 thriller The Boys From Brazil (with a dust jacket clearly intended to evoke the dust jacket of The Odessa File), Robert Ludlum’s 1978 thriller The Holcroft Covenant, and many others. Even Stephen King’s novella Apt Pupil (collected in his 1982 book Different Seasons but written shortly after he completed The Shining in 1976), about a Los Angeles teenager who discovers that an old man of his acquaintance is actually a wanted Nazi war criminal, seems to have been inspired by Forsyth. It’s probably not coincidental that King’s story begins in 1974, the year that the film version of The Odessa File was released. Brian Moore’s 1995 novel The Statement, about a French collaborator who helped the Nazis exterminate Jews during the war, seems also to be a variation on The Odessa Files.
Those who write obituaries for Forsyth will have to devote a large block of text to the success and influence of Jackal, Odessa, and Dogs. But after detailing the cultural impact of those three books (the films and imitators they inspired, etc.), most obituaries will probably back up and describe Forsyth’s upbringing, his service in the RAF, and his years as a journalist and an unpaid agent for MI6. After that, I suspect we will get a simple recitation of some of his mid-career titles: The Devil’s Alternative, The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator, The Fist of God, Icon, and so forth. If the books Forsyth published in the twenty-first century are mentioned at all, it will probably be done in a desultory manner, with the writer noting that none of these last seven books attained anywhere near the cultural relevance of his first three novels. And that will be a shame. While it is true that Forsyth’s last seven books (beginning with The Veteran in the year 2000 and ending with 2018’s The Fox) had nowhere near the kind of cultural impact that his earlier novels did, all of these books are highly readable and several of them are not just readable but unputdownable.
I (born in 1958) am a longtime fan of Forsyth’s works and was introduced to his fiction in the late 1970s, when I first read Jackal and then moved on to Odessa. The Dogs of War, with its complex geopolitics, felt almost too real, too journalistic to satisfy a thrill-loving pop-fiction junkie like me, especially one who was not yet well-versed in world affairs. Nonetheless, I recognized that it was incredibly intelligent and well made. I have always meant to re-read it but, alas, have yet to do so. After the publication of The Dogs of War, in 1974, Forsyth entered what may have been his most fecund period of creativity. This period began with the publication, in 1975, of The Shepherd, a short (and supernatural) Christmas tale that was published as a slender standalone book and beautifully illustrated by Lou Feck (the British edition was illustrated by Chris Foss, but I have never owned a copy and can’t comment on his work). Next, in 1979, came The Devil’s Alternative, a thriller that began life as a screenplay for which Forsyth was paid $150,000 by Paramount Pictures. When it became clear the film would never be produced, Forsyth turned the screenplay into a novel, which became the eighth bestselling work of fiction in America for the year 1980. I liked The Devil’s Alternative, but after that he put together a four-book run that I think may be my favorite. This period began in 1982 with No Comebacks, a collection of ten stories, most of them in the thriller/crime genre. In late 2021, as the book’s fortieth anniversary was approaching, I wrote an appreciation of it for a blog maintained by Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. If you want a fuller examination of the book, I suggest you check out that blog entry.
Next, in 1984, came The Fourth Protocol, a gripping thriller about a Soviet attempt to assemble and detonate a small nuclear weapon in England and blame it on the Americans. In 1989 came The Negotiator, another great thriller, this one involving the kidnapping of an American President’s son. And then, finally, The Deceiver, published in 1991, and comprising four novellas about the life and career of fictitious British spymaster Sam McCready. The book is actually a novelization of a limited British TV series called Frederick Forsyth presents, which aired six episodes between December of 1989 and December of 1990. I don’t know why Forsyth chose to novelize only four of those episodes.
I concluded my essay on The Veteran by nothing that the plethora of details that made books like Jackal and Odessa so compelling in the 1970s began to weigh down many of his later books, causing them to be less enjoyable. But this was not quite true. You see, after reading The Deceiver, I found myself struggling with rest of the novels Forsyth brought out in the 1990s, particularly The Fist of God (1994) and Icon (1996). His 1999 novel, The Phantom of Manhattan, was a bit of a change of pace. It is a sequel to Gaston Leroux’s 1910 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera. Forsyth was encouraged to write the novel by his longtime friend Andrew Lloyd Webber (they met when Webber composed the soundtrack for the 1974 film version of The Odessa File). The book is a short and entertaining piece of work but very minor. After reading it, I found that I was no longer eagerly awaiting each new Forsyth novel. I figured we were through with each other. And, for far too long, we were.
I gave the impression in my essay about The Veteran that I had at least attempted to read most of Forsyth’s later works but had found them all as unsatisfying as The Fist of God and Icon had been for me. But this wasn’t true. After reading The Phantom of Manhattan, I gave up on him for years. But after I wrote my appreciation of Forsyth’s No Comebacks, I got a message from a sharp-eyed reader. He told me that No Comebacks was not, as I had claimed, Forsyth’s only story collection. He encouraged me to seek out The Veteran, a collection of Forsyth stories published in 2000. I read The Veteran and liked it so much that I wrote another essay for Janet Hutchings about it:
https://somethingisgoingtohappen.net/2022/02/10/the-veteran-by-frederick-forsyth-by-kevin-mims/
After that I realized that I had been foolish to give up on Forsyth’s work after The Phantom of Manhattan. The tales in The Veteran had so thoroughly dazzled me that I set out to read all five of the novels that followed it. I have also re-read, over the last couple of years, many of his earlier works, which is why books such as The Deceiver and The Shepherd and so forth have been appearing in my year-end lists of all the books I’ve read. In this essay, however, I’d like to take a look at the five novels he has published this century.
Avenger, published in 2003, is not only the best of Forsyth’s twenty-first century novels, it is one of his best novels – period. Forsyth came up with the idea after the Clinton Administration passed new regulations on the kinds of informants and intermediaries the CIA could use in its efforts to collect foreign intelligence and head off any terrorist attacks. After the Gulf War of the early 90s, much was made of the fact that Saddam Hussein had for many years been a client of the CIA, providing the agency with info about Iran and other countries in exchange for weaponry and other goodies. Leftwing media venues seemed particularly vexed by this and urged President Clinton to prevent the CIA from dealing with such murderous thugs in the future. This seemed sensible to me at the time. But Forsyth predicted it would be disastrous. Intelligence operatives, by their very nature, are forced to interact frequently with traitors, mercenaries, strongmen, thugs, and so forth. Nuns and Boy Scouts rarely have the kind of intel sought by the likes of MI6 or the CIA or the KGB. At any rate, Avenger 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. Calvin Dexter is a lawyer and a former U.S. Army “tunnel rat” who, during the Vietnam War, descended into the ingenious labyrinth of tunnels the North Vietnamese Army employed for sneaking behind enemy lines and pulling off all sorts of successful guerilla actions against the U.S. and South Vietnamese Armies. Tunnel rat duty was one of the most dangerous and terrifying jobs in the military during that war, and it made Dexter tough as tungsten steel. Now retired from military life, Dexter still takes on special military-adjacent operations for private clients when the cause strikes him as just. As the novel opens, Dexter 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.
Avenger is thrilling. Like all of Forsyth’s later fiction (and much of his earlier work) it is a sort of right-wing fantasy novel. I don’t mean that as an insult. All of Forsyth’s twenty-first century novels are akin to Liam Neeson’s Taken movies or Denzel Washington’s Equalizer movies or, going further back, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films. They answer the question: What would it be like if a really powerful good guy could be allowed to go after a bunch of bad guys without any sort of restraints – no laws, no concern for civil rights, no fear of governmental authorities – what if he could just unleash hell on the bad guys with complete abandon? It is a very simple-minded proposition but Forsyth usually manages to complicate it in ways that Hollywood doesn’t. After all, you don’t come to the end of a Liam Neeson film and find yourself half wishing that Neeson might fail to catch and kill his prey. But in Avenger, that’s exactly what happens.
Forsyth followed it up with The Afghan, published in 2006. Unfortunately, this one is a sequel of sorts to The Fist of God, one of my least favorite Forsyth novels. The Afghan was shorter and, in my opinion, much more readable than The Fist of God, but it still didn’t thrill me.
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. This is another 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 and its drug-lord leader. 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 cocaine 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. (In his later years Forsyth seems to have become slightly more enamored of the U.S. than his own U.K. I think America’s forceful – but often wrongheaded – response to 9/11, its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, its water-boarding and its Gitmo POW camp, appealed to his belief that evil must be countered with overwhelming force. But he retains enough fondness for Great Britain that, even when his stories largely concern America and Americans, he always brings in a secondary British force to help out the Yanks.)
Devereaux brings on board as his right-hand man…Calvin Dexter, the Avenger himself! Devereaux also played a supporting role in Avenger, but here he is center stage. The two men were working against each other in that novel (Devereaux wanted to catch bin Laden and Dexter, unwittingly, was working against that effort). In The Cobra they are united in an effort to destroy the worldwide cocaine market. (Avenger is highly critical of Bill Clinton and his administration. The Cobra was written early in Obama’s tenure and isn’t highly critical of him although, in the end, the Obama administration opts to scuttle Devereaux’s mission just as it appears to be on the brink of ultimate victory. Forsyth is a political conservative and it seems likely that, had The Cobra come out towards the end of Obama’s presidency, he’d have been as harshly critical of Obama as he had earlier been of Clinton.)
The first thing the Cobra does after getting the go-ahead from both Obama and the British Prime Minister is kidnap Juan Cortez, a lowly Colombian dock worker who has spent years welding false floors and walls and ceilings into oceangoing shipping vessels. These vessels, which carry legitimate cargo in their holds, are equipped to carry several tons of cocaine hidden in the fiendishly clever compartments created by Cortez. Unless one is aware of just where Cortez’s hiding places are located and how they can be accessed, it is virtually impossible to get at them. Fortunately, Cortez, though nearly illiterate, has a photographic memory. After being kidnapped by the Americans and whisked away to an American Air Force Base, he eventually agrees to supply the Cobra and his men with the names of all the cargo vessels he has worked on, and to provide them with precise instructions for finding and accessing all of the secret compartments he has created on these ships. Armed with this information, the Cobra’s team uses a pair of highly sophisticated Air Force drones to locate and photograph each ship from the air, creating a sort of digital fingerprint for each vessel, which will allow the ship to be identified automatically anytime a drone should spot it leaving a harbor with a load of cocaine hidden aboard.
In the old days, Forsyth would probably have filled many pages with descriptions of how these drones operate. He used to pride himself on the documentary realism that characterized his descriptions of complicated military hardware, oceangoing vessels, commercial vehicles, and much more. Often, when you finished reading a Forsyth novel you felt as if you could now construct a dirty bomb from scratch or crack the most secure safe in Switzerland. After reading The Odessa File I was fully versed in the differences between the shock absorbers used in British automobiles and the ones used in German automobiles. Alas, towards the end of his writing career, his researching skills seemed to go a bit slack. One of the saddest sentences in all of pop fiction appears on page 118 of the paperback edition of The Cobra: “It took the locksmith eighteen seconds and a very clever piece of technology to penetrate the electronic door to the suite.” Reading that is like watching a once-great golfer miss a six-inch put by four inches. It brings tears to the eyes of any true Forsyth fan. There’s no way that the Forsyth of the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s would have whiffed so badly at an opportunity to describe an esoteric tool of the burglary and espionage trades. He’d have spent at least a page describing just exactly how that “very clever piece of technology” was designed and built and put to use. But not any more.
Alas, the two incredibly powerful Air Force drones that feature prominently in The Cobra – they are named “Michele” and “Sam” after the wives of Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron – appear to be the kind of inventions that exist only in Mission: Impossible movies. They can track and locate just about anything, anywhere, at any time. What’s more, after locating a ship carrying cocaine, they can somehow, from 20,000 feet in the air, block all transmissions from those ships – radio transmissions, cell phone calls, everything. In fact, the communication devices not only cannot transmit, they can’t even operate, which seems unlikely, since cell phones have their own power source. Even if you could block a cell phone from transmitting, you couldn’t keep it from powering on. At any rate, Forsyth’s fictional drones effectively lower a dome of silence over a cocaine ship so that it cannot call for help while it is being raided by masked Navy SEALS, stripped of its cocaine, and then blown up and consigned to the bottom of the ocean (along with its legitimate cargo) while its crew members are blindfolded and taken aboard a nearby ship that the Cobra has kept just out of sight so that the kidnapped crewmen will never be able to identify it.
The Cobra and his team have the use of two oceangoing vessels, The Chesapeake, which is operated by an American military crew, and the Balmoral, which is operated by Brits. These ships look like standard civilian cargo vessels but they have been dramatically altered. Beneath their decks each ship conceals a helicopter, several prison cells for the kidnapped crews of seized and sunken cocaine boats, and various other modifications. The helicopters can be raised to the deck with a derrick and then put into action. Usually the helicopter is the first piece of the Cobra’s hardware that the captain of a cocaine vessel sees approaching him (the drones are small and fly too high to ever be detected). Next he sees a couple of RIBS (rigid, inflatable boats – Forsyth has always loved military acronyms and provides a handy glossary of them at the front of the book). Upon spotting a helicopter in the air above the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the boat captains are usually quite confused. Helicopters don’t have the range to reach the mid-Atlantic on their own. They can fly out there only if they depart from an aircraft carrier or some other large military vessel (some super yachts are equipped with small helicopters, but nothing military grade). But if something as large as an aircraft carrier was anywhere in the vicinity of a cocaine ship, it would have shown up on the radar. The sight of these helicopters in the middle of the ocean generally confuses the captains and their crews long enough for them to be overtaken by the SEALS.
At another point in the story, the Cobra begins revealing information damaging to the cocaine cartels on the internet. Forsyth writes: “With the genius-level technology of [computer expert] Jeremy Bishop, the Cobra created a blog whose source could never be traced.” I’m fairly certain that there are millions of high school nerds across the globe who could create a blog whose source would be difficult if not impossible to trace. But if indeed Bishop created something uniquely untraceable, the old Forsyth would have reveled in telling us how it was done. Alas, Forsyth, like many older authors, has been undone by the rise of personal computers and the internet. He treats them as if they are simply magical. They do amazing things that Forsyth can’t be bothered to explain. At one point, Forsyth employs one of the dumbest clichés in contemporary fiction – a character is able to guess another character’s computer password with one try. This is especially silly because the password belongs to the Cobra, the brains behind an international operation so complex that it manages to take down almost the entire Colombian cocaine industry in a matter of months. A man as cautious as the Cobra would not have a guessable password. He would employ a random string of numbers, letters, and symbols. And he would change it frequently. Nowadays he would probably also employ facial (or voice) recognition software.
What Forsyth lacks in computer knowledge he makes up for in his knowledge of military-style operations. Forsyth was once an RAF pilot and he has always been good at describing manned flight. Fortunately, he still retains that ability. The Cobra is filled with fascinating information about aviation, including such things as rocket-assisted take off (RATO) and the characteristics of the Blackburn Buccaneer attack aircraft (the Cobra hires a Brazilian fighter pilot to man a vintage Buccaneer that has been specially modified to shoot down airplanes transporting cocaine across the Atlantic). Forsyth also notes that small private planes don’t get much scrutiny from drug enforcement authorities because they are not deemed capable of flying far enough to transport cocaine across the Atlantic Ocean. Knowing this, the drug kingpins in The Cobra use specially modified private airplanes, small planes that have had extra fuel tanks welded into the cabin, allowing them to fly 5,000 miles across the Atlantic, delivering drugs from Brazil to West Africa. Everything Forsyth writes about manned aircraft seems to have an air of authority about it. What he writes about drones (UAVs, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, in military parlance), however, seems suspect.
In any case, despite its few flaws, The Cobra is a gripping read. If it had 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.
Next, in 2013, came The Kill List. Once again, we have a lone good guy 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. This is a rare instance of Forsyth being rather ham-handed. 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).
In The Cobra, Forsyth gave us a minor character named Jeremy Bishop, who was described as a genius computer wizard. In The Kill List, we get another computer wizard, Roger Kendrick. After his initial introduction, Roger is always just referred to by his codename: Ariel. Roger is a painfully shy kid of about eighteen or nineteen. He suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and agoraphobia and lives in the attic of his parent’s home and spends all day long on his computer, hacking his way into extremely secure data bases at NASA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere, all of which is highly illegal. Roger is clearly modeled after real-life Scottish cyberhacker Gary McKinnon, who broke into some highly sensitive U.S. military computers and did a lot of damage back at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The U.S. wanted him extradited and put on trial. But he became a bit of a folk hero in Britain and the U.K.’s government refused to turn him over.
The Tracker realizes that Ariel is just a shy kid with no constructive use for his freakish skills as a cyberhacker. So the Tracker sets him up with some much more sophisticated equipment and Ariel goes to work (still holed up in his parents’ attic) tracking down bad guys. The Preacher uses a sophisticated computer expert of his own to block the location of the computer he uses to post his hate-filled sermons online. But Ariel, of course, is able to outfox the Preacher’s cyber expert. Forsyth makes only a wan effort to describe how Ariel’s computers are able to work their magic. At one point he just describes it all as “ultra-technology” to explain away its complexity.
Every novel Forsyth wrote after September 9, 2001, seems to have been inspired by the events of that day and they often reference it directly many times. The Kill List is no exception. At one point he helpfully points out to his readers, “There is simply no way of overestimating the trauma that 9/11 inflicted on the U.S. and her people. Everything changed and would never be the same again. In twenty-four hours, the giant finally woke up.” He hammers this message home again and again. He also gets sloppily sentimental at times, which isn’t something you expect from Forsyth. At one point, an older Marine who has been attacked by a terrorist, fallen into a coma, and is near death, wakes up from his coma just long enough to squeeze his son’s hand and say, “Semper Fi, son,” before dropping dead.
As with all of his other post 9/11 rightwing fantasies, this one includes the requisite notice that our hero will not be constrained by courts or constitutions or concerns about civil rights. “It was agreed both services [the U.S. and U.K.’s militaries] would get clearance for a very black operation with no sanction from any magistrate – in other words, totally illegal. But both British spooks were confident that with the Preacher’s trail of blood and death across the country, there would be no objection, right up to ministerial level if need be. The only political caveat would be the usual: Do what you feel you must, but I want to know nothing about it.”
Though Forsyth’s technical details aren’t always as sharp here as they were in his early novels, he does do a good job on two major plot points. At one point a Swedish cargo ship is hijacked by Somali pirates and Forsyth gives us a fascinating look at the negotiating that goes on behind the scenes to get the ransom paid and the ship and its crew safely released. His novel was published in August of 2013 and the Tom Hanks film Captain Phillips, which also dealt with Somali pirates, was released a month later. So apparently Forsyth had managed to tap into the zeitgeist and exploit this fascinating subject at roughly the same time that Hollywood did so. Also, Forsyth devotes the last fifty pages or so of the book to a daring military raid that involves a lot of aviation information, covering such things as HALO parachute raids (the acronym refers to High Altitude Low Opening parachutes) and the oxygen masks necessary to keep HALO jumpers from getting the bends (nitrogen bubbling in the blood). Forsyth also jokingly reminds his viewers that it is vital to keep a parachute’s leg straps away from the parachutist’s testicle area. “A faller with his family furniture inside these straps will find life very unfunny when the chute jerks open.” Forsyth was an RAF flyer and he is on familiar territory here – and it shows. For all its faults – the characters are about as bland as their aliases: Tracker, Preacher, Gray Fox, Ariel, etc. – the book is never less than a page-turner. And in the last quarter of the book, where computer knowledge becomes less important, Forsyth seems to be back in top form, or very near it.
In 2018, Forsyth brought out The Fox, his final novel (he has stated in interviews that he is no longer writing fiction). In The Cobra, as noted, Forsyth gave us a minor character who was a young computer wizard. In The Kill List he gave us a major supporting character who was a young computer wizard. In The Fox, he gives us a title character who is also a young computer wizard. This time, computer wizardry is pretty much the whole focus of the novel, which is unfortunate 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. Apparently I wasn’t alone. The Fox is one of his lowest-rated books on Goodreads.com (although it still earns a respectable 3.8 out of a possible five stars there). Many Goodreads reviewers complained that The Fox betrays Forsyth’s woeful lack of understanding of how computers work. They have a point. This fault marred The Cobra and The Kill List, but it is more glaring in The Fox simply because the entire story is about computers. Forsyth appears to know virtually nothing about the complex workings of computers and the internet. Over and over again he employs the same commonly used terms – database, firewall, algorithm, malware, access code, etc. – but he doesn’t seem entirely sure of what they mean. The title character, codenamed the Fox, is a British teenager named Luke Jennings (curiously, the name of a contemporary British thriller writer) who is gifted with hacking skills that come across as simply supernatural because Forsyth has no way of describing them. To explain Luke’s gift, Forsyth afflicts him with Asperger’s syndrome, just as he did Roger Kendrick/Ariel. The cliché of autism or Asperger’s granting almost supernatural powers to its young sufferers wasn’t original when Stephen King used it in the 2002 miniseries Rose Red. By now it is a hoary cliché of pop fiction to treat autism, Asperger’s, and other neurological conditions as if they empower the victim with special intellectual powers, as a sort of offset for their “antisocial” personalities. What’s even worse, is that Luke Jennings is barely even a character in the novel named after him. He delivers almost no dialog whatsoever. He is basically just a device that allows Forsyth to explain how an elderly British spymaster named Adrian Weston nearly drives Britain’s enemies – Russia, Iran, North Korea – mad by hacking into their military hardware and government computer systems and nearly destroying all three countries. Again, this is essentially a rightwing fantasy about how a good man, if he is unfettered by pesky civil rights norms and international treaties, could solve all of the West’s problems in a matter of weeks.
Forsyth, by this time in his career, seemed to be heavily influenced by Taken, the 2008 film in which Liam Neeson uses his skills as a retired CIA agent to retrieve his daughter from the Albanian gangsters who have kidnapped her. The film featured a speech delivered by Neeson to the gangsters that has since become iconic:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a31775/taken-speech/
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you."
After that film came out, you rarely encountered the word “skill” in a thriller film or novel without finding the word “set” somewhere nearby. In The Fox, Forsyth combines these words many times. At one point, Britain’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment is said to be practicing “their many skill sets.” A few pages later, we are told that covert entry and invisibility are among the SRR’s “skill sets.” And a few pages after that we learn that, “One of the skill sets of the SRR is known as CTR, or close-targeted recce [i.e., reconnaissance].” Elsewhere, he says of Britain’s Special Forces: “Broadly speaking, they have a very high IQ and multiple skill sets.” In each case, the word skills would have been sufficient. For much of his career, Forsyth seemed to be providing Hollywood with fodder for their thrillers. But now it is the other way around. Late-career Forsyth seems to be heavily influenced by films such as the Taken franchise, the Bourne franchise, and the Mission: Impossible franchise.
In The Fox, Adrian Weston has assigned a British computer expert named Dr. Hendricks to supervise Luke Jennings and try to learn the secrets of his miraculous hacking skills. But Hendricks mainly serves as a surrogate for Forsyth, gasping in awe as Jennings pulls off one brilliant hack after another that Hendricks cannot possibly explain. At one point, Jennings, from a British safe house, hacks into a computer in Iran that operates all of that country’s nuclear research facilities. Forsyth writes: “Dr. Hendricks gaped in near disbelief. Somehow, and he had no idea how, it had been achieved: Luke Jennings had crossed the air gap and entered the right algorithms. The firewalls opened, the faraway database capitulated. There was no need to go on. They had the codes.” Again and again, Jennings is able to “jump the air gap” and enter a foreign computer, a feat that Forsyth describes as “impossible,” and rightly so. It cannot be done.
An air-gapped computer is one that is physically separated from others and cannot be accessed wirelessly or physically by any other computer. Many online reviewers have howled at Forsyth’s lack of understanding of what an air gap is. One Goodreads critic wrote, “Sadly it’s obvious that Forsyth doesn’t have the foggiest idea what hackers do or how they do it…The air gap is got around by sending somebody to the office or bank which is not connected to the outside world, who plugs in a flashdrive to a computer in that building. Or by infecting a laptop carried by someone who works in that building. Hackers will look for badges dropped at conferences and airline ticket stubs, will skim debit cards, make phone calls impersonating staff, send phishing emails, and so on, to gain details for access. Forsyth says none of this; he only knows a few buzz words…” Things have come to a sorry state indeed, when random book reviewers on Goodreads now appear to understand how the world of espionage works better than Frederick Forsyth does.
Forsyth tells us that the Iranian nuclear program is “controlled by a master computer, guided by a database so skillfully protected by layer after layer of firewall that only the on-site Iranian operators, armed with the access codes, could enter it. It was these impossible-to-obtain access codes that the teenager sitting beside Dr. Hendricks at Chandler’s Court had penetrated.”
Forsyth seems to believe that computers are operated by databases. The term database has been degraded through the decades. Originally it just meant a set of data available to all users of a computer network. Wikipedia notes that, nowadays, database “is often used to refer to any collection of related data (such as a spreadsheet or card index)…” and not necessarily a computerized collection. But Forsyth seems to think it is the very brains of a computer. At one point, as Luke Jennings is about to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, computer technicians in Iran try frantically to regain control of their system. But, writes Forsyth, “The database refused to obey.” He sees databases as malevolent entities, lurking in the shadows, ready to turn on their masters. At one point he writes of a secret British government site that houses a top-secret computer system, “This is where the database flickers deep beneath the suburban streets. And the database is protected by fearsome firewalls that guard the vital access codes.” As described by Forsyth, these databases sound like the primitive supercomputers depicted in 1950s movies, massive systems that fill entire rooms with beeping sounds and flashing lights (see, for instance, Walter Lang’s 1957 film Desk Set).
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 technical prowess 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. And though the computer details that make it possible are nonsense, it is great fun when the Fox seizes control of an enormous new Russian aircraft carrier and runs it aground on British soil, humiliating the Russian military and infuriating Vladimir Putin. 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. And if you take a sip of single malt Scotch every time you encounter the word “database” or the phrase “skill set,” you’re likely to be drunk before you reach page forty.
Forsyth began his novel-writing career with a jackal and ended it with a fox, which seems appropriate. As Wikipedia puts it: “Like foxes and coyotes, jackals are often depicted as clever sorcerers in the myths and legends of their regions.” Forsyth’s career established him as one of the cleverest sorcerers of his generation of popular fiction writers. He began as a crafty young jackal and finished his run as a sly old fox. But his books were never less than entertaining, and often they were much more than that.