THE FINAL FORSYTH SAGA

NOTE: Because this is a review of a not-yet-published novel, I have tried to keep spoilers to a minimum. This review contains a fairly broad description of the plot but it doesn’t reveal much more than you might find on a book’s dust jacket or back cover. The novel contains numerous excellent plot twists that are not even mentioned here. Nonetheless, if you want to go into Revenge of Odessa knowing nothing about it, skip this review.

Frederick Forsyth, who died on June 9^th, often wrote novels that appeared to be either ripped from the day’s headlines or written in advance of tomorrow’s. His 1996 thriller, Icon, was the tale of a fascist strongman’s effort to gain the presidency of Russia for nefarious purposes. The book is set in the year 2000, the year in which Vladimir Putin would first ascend to the Russian presidency. Forsyth’s 1994 novel, The Fist of God, was (at 592 pages) the first major work of popular fiction to deal entirely with the Gulf War of 1990-1991. What’s more, it involves a search for a weapon of mass destruction that has been secretly obtained by Saddam Hussein’s military, a plot twist which foreshadows the pretext used a decade later by the administration of George W. Bush for the American military invasion of Iraq. Forsyth’s 1971 debut novel, about a highly trained assassin, would eventually inspire the press to dub famous Venezuelan assassin Ilich Ramírez Sánchez “Carlos the Jackal,” and to this day Sanchez’s Wikipedia page can be found under that codename rather than the killer’s given name. Forsyth’s 1972 novel, The Odessa File, is a fictionalized search for a notorious real-life Nazi named Eduard Roschmann. The novel helped (via its film adaptation) to flush Roschmann out of a comfortable retirement in Argentina and forced him to spend his final years miserably running from the law. Forsyth’s 2010 thriller, Cobra, is about a U.S. President who decides to forgo the niceties of the presumption of innocence and The Bill of Rights and put together a task force that will intercept drug smuggling boats and airplanes headed for the U.S. from South and Central America and blast them out of the skies/waters. Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to be taking inspiration from Forsyth’s fifteen-year-old novel when he order a U.S. military unit to fire upon a boat allegedly attempting to smuggle drugs into the U.S. from Venezuela. The small boat was sunk in the Caribbean Sea, and all eleven of its occupants were killed. Writing for the Washington Post Book World in September of 2010, reviewer Patrick Anderson called Forsyth’s novel “unconvincing…a fantasy.” I wonder what he thinks of it now.

After his novel The Fox came out in 2018, Forsyth announced that it would probably be his last. He claimed he no longer had the stamina to do the kind of traveling that his research required. Not until I began reading his obituaries back in June did I learn that Forsyth had recently completed another novel, written with the assistance of thriller writer Tony Kent. This final novel, called Revenge of Odessa, will be published in the U.S. in November, and is a sequel to The Odessa File, one of Forsyth’s best books. I recently obtained an advanced copy of Revenge of Odessa and began reading it immediately. I opened it with a bit of trepidation, worried that it might prove to be a huge disappointment. Some of the best English-language popular novels of the 20^th century produced dreadful sequels (see, for instance, Ira Levin’s Son of Rosemary, or Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II). The 21^st century has produced some awful sequels to excellent 20^th century pop fictions (see John Grisham’s recent sequel to The Firm, Tom Perrotta’s recent sequel to Election, or Charles Webbs’ 2007 sequel to The Graduate). I was also worried that perhaps the novel was mostly the work of Tony Kent and wouldn’t bear many of the hallmarks of a true Frederick Forsyth novel (insider knowledge of a variety of fascinating topics, a slow build-up to an almost operatic conclusion, a crowded cast of characters that eventually winnows itself down to a face-off between two fairly evenly matched antagonists, etc.). The good news is that I was worried for no good reason. The year 2025 isn’t likely to bring us many thrillers better than Revenge of Odessa – if any. Forsyth appears to have definitely gone out with great style. In my opinion, Revenge of Odessa is the equal of Forsyth’s 2003 novel, Avenger, which I had previously ranked as his best novel of the 21^st century. You have to go all the way back to 1991’s The Deceiver to find a better Forsyth novel. What’s more, Revenge of Odessa feels very much like a novel written by Frederick Forsyth, not a work that was ghostwritten by someone else. It contains many of the acerbic observations on life that Forsyth fans expect from his work: “Even the best students can be indoctrinated if that indoctrination is convincing them of their own exceptionalism.” And: “With the right frame of mind, a one-hour commute can become a solid hour of thinking time.” No doubt Tony Kent earned his keep on this work. Many of Forsyth’s 21^st century novels were marred by his obvious lack of familiarity with contemporary computers and internet technology. In The Fox, the main character can do seemingly anything with a computer and an internet connection, making his computer skills almost indistinguishable from magic. Tony Kent appears to have prevented Forsyth from repeating that error. Computer technology doesn’t play a huge role in Revenge of Odessa, but whenever it appears in the story, it is described believably and (as far as this techno-boob can tell) accurately.

As noted, Revenge of Odessa is a sequel to a novel that was published in 1972 and set in the year 1963. The fifty-three year gap between the original novel and the direct sequel is one of the longest in pop-fiction history, almost as impressive as the gap between John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, published in 1963, and A Legacy of Spies, published fifty-four years later in 2017 (some might argue that 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the direct sequel to The Spy Who Came In From the Cold). When I first read that Forsyth had produced a sequel to The Odessa File, I assumed that the story would be set in the 1960s or 1970s. The Odessa File concerns itself with Nazi SS officers who have escaped punishment for the crimes they helped commit during World War II and are now (i.e., in the early 1960s) living in hiding throughout Europe and South America. These war criminals are protected from Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal by an organization called ODESSA, a German acronym which, in English, translates to Organization of Erstwhile SS Members, or something along those lines. In the novel, ODESSA’s mission isn’t just to keep former SS officers alive but to allow them to network with one another in an effort to help resurrect the Nazi party and bring it back to power in Germany. Back in the early 1960s, plenty of ex-SS officers were still relatively young and vigorous, aged anywhere from forty to sixty. The notorious Eduard Roschmann, the real-life Nazi war criminal whose story comprises part of The Odessa File, was only 55 years old in 1963 and would live another fourteen years. The possibility that ex-Nazis of the WWII era might be planning a comeback of some sort was a very frightening prospect back in the 1960s and 1970s. But nowadays few actual WWII Nazi war criminals remain alive. And those who are alive have become frail and enfeebled. Setting a sequel to The Odessa File in the 21^st century didn’t seem possible to me. Fortunately, it seemed not only possible to Frederick Forsyth but downright appropriate.

Reading Revenge of Odessa, it becomes clear that Forsyth, in his final years, was alarmed by the rise of right-wing populism across the western world. This may seem somewhat surprising because Forsyth’s politics were devoutly conservative throughout his life. Nonetheless, the novel is fueled by a disdain for the populism of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and its former leader Nigel Farage, as well as the rightwing populism of America’s Republican Party and its current leader. Donald Trump isn’t mentioned by name in Revenge of Odessa – in fact, the POTUS in Forsyth’s novel is a man named Robert John Bauer, who is described as “a wannabe fascist” – but a major plot thread of the novel involves an effort to elevate a character named Cole Grisham to the office of Vice President of the United States. Here’s how Forsyth describes Grisham: “Cole Grisham had been the junior senator for Ohio for barely four months, but thanks to his previous high profile in the media, to the manner of his appointment, and to his attention-pulling behavior since taking office, his was the name now heard most often on Capitol Hill.” It’s impossible to read that description and not be reminded of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who served for two years as the junior senator from Ohio before being tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate last year.

And here is Forsyth describing President Bauer: “Bauer was a very particular personality. A populist to his core, his appeal to his voter base seemed to be how atypical he was to those who more usually held office. He was the anti-Washington choice. The man who stood up for the little guy, for those who had been sidelined for decades. Bauer had built up his support with the claim that he was ‘for real America and real Americans’ and that he was taking the country back for those who built it.”

Sound like any contemporary American office-holder to you? (If Forsyth’s choice of character names was influenced by his consumption of popular culture, then we can assume that he must have been bingeing on the TV series 24 and reading a lot of legal thrillers while writing Revenge of Odessa.)

One of the major characters in Revenge of Odessa is Vanessa Price, a young, African-American female who works on the staff of Cole Grisham. She was once on the staff of Grisham’s predecessor, Senator Jack Johnson, who died in office (in the company of a naked, teenage girl, no less). Grisham was appointed by the Governor of Ohio to replace Johnson and finish out his term. Vanessa was okay with Johnson’s politics but she loathes Grisham’s right-wing populism. Alas, she needs the job, and can’t afford to follow her conscience out the door. One night, working late at the office, Vanessa overhears a secret conversation between two of Grisham’s top advisors and becomes convinced that a plan is afoot to kill Vice President Andrew Wilson and then have President Bauer tap Cole Grisham as his replacement. Vanessa believes that President Bauer wants to let his fascist instincts run wild but is being held in check by Andrew Wilson. Wilson and Bauer don’t really get along. Their appearance together on the presidential ticket was made necessary by a desire to unite the extremists and the moderates of their political party. But Vanessa now thinks that fascist elements of the Bauer administration would like to replace Wilson with Grisham, a young populist who is unlikely to stand in the way of Bauer’s grand fascist ambitions. This part of the story gives off vibes that reminded me of the conflict between Donald Trump and his first Vice President, Mike Pence, whom he has since replaced with Vance. On January 6, 2021, some rabid Trump supporters seemed eager for Pence’s death. Political assassination has been a hallmark of Forsyth’s fiction since the beginning. In 1971, when The Day of the Jackal was published, the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were still fresh in the minds of most people who followed the American political scene. Alas, as the recent murder of Charlie Kirk has shown, political assassination is still very much a scourge of American life. And political assassination, in America and elsewhere, plays an important role in Forsyth’s final novel, just as in so many of his previous ones.

The whole Vanessa Price storyline is interesting and exciting and it breaks new ground for Forsyth, who has never before featured an African-American female in a major role in a novel (for that matter, white British females rarely play a major role in his fiction, which is set largely in a man’s world of assassins, warriors, presidents and prime ministers). I applaud Forsyth for stepping outside his comfort zone by populating his book with a few young American females, but his word choices sometimes give away the fact that these characters were written by a British male in his eighties. A one point, Katie Braid, a thirtysomething assistant to Cole Grisham, tells Vanessa about Grisham, “Right now no matter how much the talk shows like him and the cable channels keep playing his soundbites [sic], he’s a cuckoo. He wasn’t elected. He was parachuted in. That’s a weakness we don’t need…” At first I assumed that Katie used “cuckoo” to imply that Grisham was somewhat nutty. But, no, in context, it’s clear that she is referring to the cuckoo bird, some breeds of which are famous for placing their eggs in the nests of other birds. This practice gave rise to the term “cuckolding,” which describes a man who finds that some other man has been sleeping in his bed (and with his wife). The term has been around since at least the thirteenth century, and was once fairly commonplace in English literature. But it seems unlikely that two thirtysomething Americans would describe an unelected U.S. Senator as a cuckoo in the sense that Forsyth intends. And if one Cole Grisham staff member described Grisham as a “cuckoo” to another staff member, she would probably hasten to add that she wasn’t implying that their boss was a nut job, lest she find her job in jeopardy. Elsewhere, Forsyth has Vanessa thinking: “Bar me, Alice and Indira were the only members of the new team not hand-picked by Tony Bennett.” Bar me? That doesn’t sound like something a young American would think. Despite a few poor word choices, however, the Vanessa Price sections of the novel are highly entertaining.

“But wait a minute,” I hear you asking me, “what the heck does a young American woman who works for a U.S. Senator have to do with ODESSA, an organization that, when last we encountered it, existed mainly to protect and elevate to power the last vestiges of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron)?” Well, Vanessa Price’s scenes make up only about a third of the novel. The other two thirds of the novel are set in contemporary Germany and concern the activities of a crusading German journalist named Georg Miller. Georg is the grandson of Peter Miller, a crusading journalist who was the main character in The Odessa File. In Revenge of Odessa, Peter is still alive and mentally sharp but, at the age of 93, his days as a crusading, Nazi-hunting journalist are far behind him. Nowadays he mainly serves as a role model for Georg. His relationship with his grandson reminded me of the relationship between River Cartwright (a young spy, played by Jack Lowden, in the Apple TV series Slow Horses) and his ancient grandfather David (Jonathan Pryce). If you have never read The Odessa File – or, if you’ve read it but no longer remember it clearly – fear not. Early in Revenge of Odessa, Forsyth recaps Peter Miller’s greatest journalistic coup – uncovering and exposing the existence of ODESSA. After Miller shone the bright light of a journalistic exposé on ODESSA back in the early 1960s, the German people were outraged and the German government commenced to run the organization out of existence. Or so the German people were lead to believe. Alas, a chance encounter with a senile Nazi in a chaotic hospital ward will inspire Georg to question whether or not ODESSA ever really disbanded. Perhaps, he thinks, it merely just became better at hiding itself. And [SPOILER ALERT] he is right. ODESSA is still very much in existence, although it is no longer populated by actual WWII-era Nazis but by younger men (and women!) eager to bring some version of Hitler’s Third Reich back into power. This new breed of Nazis has nothing but contempt for the right-wing populists of the AfD, whom they consider insufficiently fascist because they do not (outwardly, at least) sing the praises of a master race and desire to see Jews, Blacks, gays, and Muslims (among others) eliminated from society. Nonetheless, these neo-ODESSANs (a term never used in the book) see AfD followers as useful idiots. The members of ODESSA are hoping that the AfD’s lightweight nationalism will appeal to enough German voters to eventually put the Alternative for Germany movement in control of the German government. At that point, the ODESSANS plan to move in and take control of the AfD movement and bring about a full return to Hitlerian Nazism. They also hope that right-wing populist movements in France and Italy will allow them to bring the old Axis band back together for a repeat of those wonderful days when the Nazis controlled most of Europe. And the right-wing populism movement in the U.S. is giving the ODESSA members hope that the Administration of President Bauer will be as uninterested in opposing Nazi aggression as the Trump administration is in opposing Russian aggression.

So did Forsyth turn into a liberal squish in his final years? Hardly. The novel opens with a horrific mass killing committed by Islamic terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar!” When Georg Miller tries to interview some young, right wing victims of the attack they denounce both him and the entire mainstream German press corps. He responds, “I want to make sure the whole truth reaches the public. Not some politician’s spin.”

“Really?” one of the men asks. “Where were you after Magdeburg, when the government and the media tried to convince us that an Arab screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he drove a car into a crowd of Germans at a Christmas market was an anti-Islamist?”

Before Georg can answer, another man asks him, “And what about Bonn? A bomb literally inside a church. And how did you arseholes report it? ‘No reason to suggest a connection to Islamic extremism,’ that’s how. If we didn’t have AfD and social media, you sonsofbitches would keep us in the dark forever.”

These responses echo the sentiments of some contemporary American conservatives (and even moderates, like moi) who have grown frustrated with the way that many mainstream news outlets cover current events. During the Black Lives Matter riots that followed the murder of George Floyd, many mainstream TV reporters insisted that the protests were mostly peaceful, even while images of burning buildings and looting rioters were visible behind them. Likewise, many mainstream journalists wrote critically of conservative Christian pastors who refused to cancel their church services during the early days of the pandemic when social distancing was being called for by the medical establishment. But these same journalists not only didn’t criticize the liberals who gathered in large numbers for Black Lives Matter protest marches, they often actively cheered such gatherings. More recently, the horrific murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, a blonde Caucasian woman, by Decarlos Brown Jr., an African-American male, has been treated by many in the mainstream press as a tragic story about the dangers of a society that doesn’t properly treat the mentally ill. But many conservatives view it as a story about a racially motivated hate crime which the mainstream media are refusing to identify as such simply because of the inconvenient fact that the perpetrator is black and the victim white. (Sadly, Zarutska seems to be just about the only Ukrainian whose murder most American conservatives give a damn about.)

The parallels between the angry AfD supporters in Forsyth’s novel and the anger towards the press among many American conservatives these days are stark and give the novel a great deal of cultural relevance, which is generally a hallmark of Forsyth’s fiction. In the novel, the AfD supporters eventually agree to be interviewed, and afterwards George is forced to conclude that, “The attackers had been Islamist terrorists and they had gunned down children.”

Georg, though he was once a standard-issue European liberal, often appears to be a mouthpiece for Forsyth’s own beliefs. He notes that, “What had once been left or right and open for debate had become right or wrong, with all debate closed off. It was a recipe for mass unrest, reminding Georg of what his grandfather had said for years: When you outlaw the truth, you pave the road to hell. Georg had initially rejected this wisdom. And he’d ignored his instincts. Until the day that the message from both grew too loud.

“It was after Magdeburg in December 2024 that Georg began to listen. A car-ramming attack on the Magdeburg Christmas Market had left five dead and over three hundred injured. Finding his journalistic integrity riled by the swift public statement that the Christmas tragedy was no more and no less than a mental health issue – an act of a man driven mad by his own inner demons – he began to ask questions. How could those mental health issues have been identified so quickly? How could other potential motives – some might say glaringly obvious motives – have been dismissed in almost an instant?”

Passages like that demonstrate that Forsyth never became a liberal squish. But neither was he a garden-variety doctrinaire conservative. He was a thoughtful man whose heterodox opinions often ran contrary to the conventional wisdom of both right and left.

Throughout his writing career Forsyth was a consistent critic/hater of the Soviet Union, portraying it as the Evil Empire that Ronald Reagan once labeled it. And even after the U.S.S.R. fell, at a time when many pundits seemed to believe that Russia was on the brink of transforming itself into a decent global citizen, Forsyth knew that such a transformation would never happen. While media chatterers were celebrating the coming “peace dividend,” Forsyth was warning us that, without the politburo to act as a check on its chief executive, the Kremlin was likely to become even more dangerous than it had been under leaders like Gorbachev and Brezhnev. I suspect that Forsyth’s deep dislike of the Soviet Union and Russia is what caused him to turn against right wing populists, such as Donald Trump and JD Vance, men who seem almost fond of Vladimir Putin, and who also seem to think that Ukraine started its current war with Russia. Revenge of Odessa might well have been written out of desire to expose right wing populism as a dangerous element in the west, by a writer who remained a steely-eyed cold warrior until the very end. Neither the Soviets nor the Russians play any role in Revenge of Odessa. But by populating his novel with plenty of latter-day Nazis, Forsyth seems to be suggesting that the recrudescence of Stalinism that is taking place under Putin is likely to be no less disastrous than the recrudescence of the Nazi Party of the World War II era would be.

The 1970s were a golden era for swastika novels – i.e. pop fictions about the Nazis still among us, most of them featuring swastikas on their paperback covers. The Boys From Brazil, Marathon Man, The Valhalla Exchange, The Holcroft Covenant, The Spear – books like this could be found on every supermarket paperback rack throughout the 1970s. But it was Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File that truly popularized the genre, and it remains probably the best of the lot. Revenge of Odessa might not be quite as good as its predecessor, but it is nonetheless an excellent example of the genre. And, with Ira Levin and Robert Ludlum and William Goldman all long dead, it will almost certainly be the last of the Nazis-Among-Us novels written by an author who played an important part in the genre’s 1970s heyday.