• British novelist Frederick Forsyth, who authored best-selling thrillers such as ‘The Day of the Jackal’ and ‘The Dogs of War’, passed away on June 9. He was 86.

• Born in Kent, in southern England, in 1938, Forsyth served as a Royal Air Force pilot before becoming a foreign correspondent. 

• He covered the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, which provided inspiration for The Day of the Jackal, his bestselling political thriller about a professional assassin.

• He wrote this book in just 35 days, during a period of personal hardship.

• Published in 1971, the book propelled him into global fame. It was made into a film in 1973 starring Edward Fox as the Jackal and more recently a television series starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch.

• Next came ‘The Odessa File’ in 1972, the story of a young German freelance journalist who tries to track down SS man Eduard Roschmann, or ‘The Butcher of Riga’.

• After that, ‘The Dogs of War’ in 1974 is about a group of mercenaries hired by a British mining magnate to kill the dictator of an African republic and replace him with a puppet.

• In 2015, Forsyth told the BBC that he had also worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 for many years, starting from when he covered a civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s.

• Forsyth attributed much of his success to luck, recalling how a bullet narrowly missed him while he was covering the bloody Biafra civil war between 1967 and 1970.

• He wrote more than 25 books including ‘The Afghan’, ‘The Kill List’, and ‘The Fist of God’.

• His books sold more than 75 million copies.

• Many of his novels were also turned into films.

• A sequel to ‘The Odessa File’, titled ‘Revenge Of Odessa’, on which he worked with thriller writer Tony Kent, is due to be published in August this year.

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