Legendary novelist Frederick Forsyth tells the wildest story of his career — his own

The World
Frederick Forsyth leaves the fiction world behind to tell the tale of his own life in the new autobiography, "Outsider: My Life in Intrigue."

If you get the chance, dive into Frederick Forsyth's new book.

This one's a little different from his usual spy and suspense novels.

It's a memoir.

"The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue."

You open the cover, and he starts regaling you with stories from his life. Compared to most, it's pretty exciting.

"There are people in this world who I regard as danger freaks. I am emphatically not one," he says. "But I do have a bump of curiosity. I was born with it. If I see a lid, I have to lift it and see what's inside. And if I see a closed box I have to open it to find out what's inside. So I was curious about, well, just everything."

He says that growing up in a “one horse town” made him want to travel and see the world. But so did his father. Before World War II, his father worked on a rubber plant in the Far East. "He told me about these places and he fired my imagination," he says.

A great part in the book illustrates just how supporting Forsyth's father was. As a young kid, Forsyth got into Cambridge, but what he really wanted to be was a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force. The folks at Cambridge looked down on such a pursuit. But Forsyth's father defended his son's desire to serve. "My school was very snobbish. They didn't seem to mind a career in a good regiment in the Army. They didn't seem to mind a Navy commission. But they took the view that a pilot was little more than a mechanic," he says. "So he took on this snobbery."

Forsyth became one of the youngest pilots in the RAF.

He also went on to find another job that allowed him to explore the world: foreign correspondence. He had quite a career. It was during this time he started working with MI6, or "The Firm" as he calls it. They wanted to know information about what was really happening in the Biafran War in Nigeria. It was a terrible war that lasted three years. The agency wanted to know if stories of dying children were true. He reported they were very true.

Upon his return from Nigeria, he found himself back in London without a job or any savings. He got the idea that a good way to make money would be to write a novel. "It's the silliest way to make money," he says. "Rob a bank if you like, but don't write a novel. But I didn't know that, so I wrote the story that I had witnessed up close and personal back in 1962-63 in Paris, when I was at Reuters watching the OAS (a French paramilitary organization) try to kill Charles de Gaulle and failing. So I thought the only way they might, might succeed would bee if they could bring in an outsider, a hitman, a mercenary with a rifle who was not know to anybody."

A jackal.

"So I wrote this story as I thought it could happen and I began to huck it around the publishers," he says. "I got, 'No. No. No. No.' Nobody read it until number five. And he read it and he said, 'Look. It's weird. But I'm going to take a flyer with this and I'm going to publish it. And then he added something weird, 'Actually, I'm going to take an even bigger fly. I'm going to ask you to do me two more novels.' At that point, I thought, wow. Money."

Those novels?

The Day of The Jackal.

The Odessa File.

The Dogs of War.

All classics.

Forsyth soon realized it was much better to write at an Irish manor house than have his head blown off in a ditch somewhere abroad covering war.

He's written ever since.

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