Jack Reacher creator Lee Child described Freddie Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal as the “book that broke the mould”. But you could just as easily say the same about its author, whose buccaneering exploits informed and inspired much of his work – giving it a realism that shone through every sentence.
Blessed with film star good looks and with a string of bestselling novels to his name, he was one of the biggest British stars of the Seventies – a genuine rock star author. In later life, when I was lucky enough to get to know him as a columnist for this paper, Freddie could be occasionally irascible, but was never anything less than entertaining, regaling friends and admirers with tales from his extraordinary career.
Asked why he was never rewarded with a knighthood, he smiled: ”I’ve put too many official noses out of joint.” It was easy to believe.
In October when his second wife of 30 years Sandy – referred to as “the CO” (commanding officer) in his weekly Daily Express columns – died, he revealed the tragic burden friends knew he had been carrying, the opioid addiction that blighted her later life. Caring for her, he admitted, had exhausted him. But it was a burden he had been loath to share until then, being of the generation not inclined to over-share.
Instead, he would take the newspapers to his local Buckinghamshire pub, the Jolly Cricketers, and enjoy a quiet lunch with a glass of red wine while he caught up on the news and thought about what to write in his weekly Express outing.
We all hoped there might be one more story.
There was a tale, he said a couple of years ago over lunch, that had been “nudging its way around up there for some time. I haven’t got round to it, partly because I’ve gone bone idle and partly because I just haven’t had the peace and quiet I need. Suffice to say, it purports to be a British agent on a mission for MI6 in East Germany during the Cold War.”
Due to pick up a package in Dresden, and denounced by a traitor in London, the agent was unwittingly placed in a race-against-the-clock with the local KGB. Having slipped back across the border to the West with the package in the nick of time, the phone rang minutes later to tell the guards: “stop that car”.
The incredible story was true, Freddie insisted. “I know this because I was driving the car, a Triumph,” he told me. “And, secondly, the KGB man in Dresden that year was Vladimir Putin.” It was as thrilling as any of his fiction – and we can only hope he managed to get it down on paper.