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Frederick Forsyth has died

Writer used his experience reporting on De Gaulle’s France to plot his thriller, and continued to draw on real-world research for subsequent bestsellers

Combining meticulous research with firecracker plots, he published a series of novels that sold more than 75m copies around the world, and won him honours including a CBE in 1997 and the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger award. “We were all waiting for the mega-story,” the author recalled in the Express, “the moment when a sniper got him through the forehead.” Forsyth got the inside track on the security operation from De Gaulle’s bodyguards and when a friend asked if an assassination would be successful, the writer shook his head. His commitment to detail was not without danger: in 1974, the author was investigating the illegal arms trade in Hamburg for The Dogs of War, the story of a group of mercenaries who plot a coup in a fictional African republic.

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