RIP: FREDERICK FORSYTH
The death, on Monday, of Frederick Forsyth brought to a close one of popular fiction’s greatest careers. Forsyth shot to prominence in 1971 with the publication of his first novel, the thriller The Day of the Jackal. He remained active up until the end. His final novel, Revenge of Odessa (written in collaboration with Tony Kent), is scheduled to be published this September, and is a sequel to his 1972 bestseller The Odessa File.
The Day of the Jackal is one of the twentieth-century’s most famous popular novels, a book whose title has become a household name in the same way as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather all have. Of the ten bestselling novels of 1971, The Day of the Jackal and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist are the only two that remain culturally relevant today. Forsyth’s novel was (loosely) adapted as the NBC TV series Jackal just last November. The series starred Academy Award-winning actor Eddie Redmayne and was a success with critics and viewers alike. But the book has influenced dozens – possibly hundreds – of other thriller novels and films, including the 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, and David Fincher’s 2023 thriller The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender.
Here’s a list of the ten bestselling novels of 1971:
Wheels by Arthur Hailey
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
The Passions of the Mind by Irving Stone
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
The Betsy by Harold Robbins
Message From Malaga by Helen MacInnes
The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
The Drifters by James A. Michener
The Other by Thomas Tryon
Rabbit Redux by John Updike
Some of those books (The Winds of War, The Other) are honorable pieces of popular fiction but are not really a part of the pop-culture conversation these days. Others (The Betsy, The Drifters) are deservedly forgotten. The Exorcist is at least as iconic a pop-fiction as The Day of the Jackal, but it is pretty much the only book of Blatty’s that anyone remembers any more. Forsyth would go on to write many more top-notch thrillers, some of which – The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol – would be nearly as highly praised, and as commercially successful, as Jackal was. Forsyth was the youngest author on the 1971 list, and he outlived all of the others – many of them by several decades (although Herman Wouk, who died in 2019 at the age of 103, was the longest lived of them all).
Here’s a list of the ten bestselling novels of 1972:
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
August, 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
The Word by Irving Wallace
The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
Captains and the Kings by Taylor Caldwell
Two From Galilee by Marjorie Holmes
My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins
Beginning in the 1980s, super bestselling authors like Tom Clancy, Stephen King, and Danielle Steel would regularly land two or more books on the same year-end list of the top ten bestsellers. But prior to that it rarely happened. Forsyth was the only novelist to accomplish the feat in the 1970s.
Of the popular novelists who shot to prominence in the 1970s, my favorites were Joseph Wambaugh and Frederick Forsyth. Wambaugh was born in 1937 and died in February of 2025. Forsyth was born in 1938 and died in June of 2025. Both men served in the military in the 1950s. Wambaugh was a U.S. Marine. Forsyth was in the Royal Air Force. Both men had extensive first-hand experience in the fields that were their primary subject matter: police work for Wambaugh; intelligence work for Forsyth. Both men repeatedly appeared on the bestsellers lists of the 1970s and 1980s. The late-career work of both writers tends to be unjustly underappreciated. Wambaugh’s five-book Hollywood Station series of novels, published between 2006 and 2012, was among his best work. Forsyth’s story collection The Veteran, and his novel Avenger, were both published in the twenty-first century and are among his best books, in my opinion. Forsyth was better than Wambaugh at creating suspense. Wambaugh was better than Forsyth at wringing comedy from his thrillers. But both men were among the best popular novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Neither man had an elite education, but their work experience allowed them to write some of the most intelligent and authentic thrillers of their era.
We may never see writers quite like Forsyth or Wambaugh again. Born just prior to World War II, both men came of age as the Korean War was being fought. They were raised in a much more macho society. Their characters drank and smoked too much and were often unrepentant sexists and, sometimes, worse. They wrote about violence like men who had seen it up close and personal. Their lifetimes spanned an amazing epoch in human history, one replete with great and awful events: a world war, a Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the rise and fall of the iron curtain, the moon landing, the assassinations of major American political and cultural figures, the Vietnam War, Thatcherism, Reaganism, and so much more.
Nowadays, we have few thriller writers who can measure up to Frederick Forsyth. Probably the writer who comes closest is Robert Harris, born nineteen years after Forsyth. Harris has a much more diverse bibliography than Forsyth. Forsyth mostly produced thrillers set in contemporary times. Harris has written lots of historical novels – Enigma, An Officer and a Spy, Munich, Pompeii, etc. – and one of the best alternate-history thrillers of all time (Fatherland). But both men generally specialized in the writing of highly intelligent, well-researched thrillers. Often the shadows of the twentieth-century’s two worst organizations – the Nazis and the KGB – loom over their works. The heroes of their books are often ordinary Brits performing extraordinary tasks under extremely difficult conditions. Forsyth was a lifelong conservative. Harris is a liberal. But the work of both men exudes a certain love for Great Britain, despite the fact that both men could/can be extremely critical of it.
The deaths of Joseph Wambaugh and Frederick Forsyth cannot be considered a great tragedy by anyone but their loved ones. Both men lived to be nearly 90 years old. Both men had long and wildly successful careers. It would be silly for a fan like me to complain that these two men were taken from us too soon. I’ve seen some of my favorite writers taken in their forties (Richard Brautigan), fifties (Philip K. Dick), and sixties (Michael Crichton). Rather than complaining about the deaths of Forsyth and Wambaugh, I’d rather just consider how lucky I (born 1958) was to come of age as a pop-fiction fan in the 1970s, when these two legendary writers were just getting started on their storied careers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the publication of a new novel by either of these authors was a thrilling event for me. I drifted away from both authors a bit in the 1990s. But that turned out to be fortunate for me, because when I returned to their work about fifteen years ago, it was like reconnecting with a couple of old friends whom I had feared were lost to me.
In preparation for this essay, I reread a recent essay in which I ranked every Forsyth book from worst to best. As I was rereading it, I was struck by how arbitrary my rankings seem to me now. In fact, as I approached the end of the list, I found myself unable to recall which of Forsyth’s books I had selected as the best. At the time I wrote the list, I sincerely believed that I was laying out a true ranking of each book’s relative worth. In fact, the list simply captures what I was feeling about the books at that time. If I were to make a list of my favorite Forsyth books today, it would almost certainly be different. At least a half dozen of Forsyth’s books (novels and story collections) could qualify as his best. And, who knows, with luck, maybe Revenge of Odessa, will turn out to be one of his masterpieces. We can only hope.