Freddie Forsyth retired from his weekly Daily Express column on his 85th birthday in August 2023 (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Freddie Forsyth’s thrilling 1972 novel about a sinister secret organisation dedicated to protecting former Nazis post-Second World War was largely conjured from his remarkable imagination. Even then, in a curious case of life imitating art, SS war criminal Eduard Roschmann, whose name and backstory Freddie had purloined, was finally brought to justice in 1977 after a man watching the film version of The Odessa File in Argentina recognised the “Butcher of Riga” and denounced him.
Its sequel, Revenge of Odessa – published earlier this week and a fitting testament to the veteran Express columnist’s genius for a good story that helped him sell a staggering 75 million books – was quite another matter.
Speaking shortly before his death aged 86 in June, Freddie revealed that he had been inspired to return to the subject matter of his second most famous book by the chilling rise of the far right across swathes of Europe.
“The political realities Odessa describes are still very much with us,” he admitted. “I’ve been toying with an idea for a sequel for a few years. Working with the very talented Tony Kent, we’ve been able to conjure an exciting new, contemporary story.”
Forsyth’s co-writer Tony Kent explains why that sequel suddenly became so urgent to Freddie, years after his “retirement” from writing books.
“If there was a real Odessa first time round, it wasn’t about bringing the Nazis back to power, but rather allowing them to survive and prosper,” says Kent, 47, a leading barrister and bestselling author in his own right.
“What we’ve done with Revenge of Odessa is much more political – it’s about the actual rebirth of the Nazis. Freddie saw the return of the far right, especially in Germany and countries to the east, like Hungary, and it alarmed him.”
Having pioneered the modern thriller with his debut novel The Day of the Jackal in 1971, Freddie announced in 2016 he was stopping novel writing, admitting wife Sandy had warned him following a research trip to Somalia: “You’re far too old, these places are bloody dangerous and you don’t run as nimbly as you used to.”
He returned briefly with The Fox in 2018 – but that, he insisted, was that. However, despite having retired from his weekly Daily Express column in August 2023 on his 85th birthday after some two decades, he never stopped thinking or talking about the topics that most interested him: namely politics, geo-political power and espionage.
Indeed, at the time of his death, he was musing on one final story based on his experiences as a spy.
That tale sadly may never have made it into print, but Revenge of Odessa is as gripping and timely as anything he wrote during his 1970s heyday.
Perhaps it was his instinct for a story, honed over many years as a foreign correspondent, but the book’s arrival at a time of unprecedented global uncertainty shows his talent for creating something thrilling as well as topical remained undimmed.
In Germany, the rise of the far-right party AfD, coupled with public dissatisfaction in politicians and an increasingly militant Left, has created tinderbox conditions.
In Britain, the growing migrant crisis, weekly demonstrations in towns and cities, and growing cynicism have led many to augur the rebirth of a toxic sort of nationalism. The time had clearly come to revisit Odessa!
“What Freddie saw, I think, is that the world now has become binary in its extremes,” Kent continues.
“We’ve created a situation like the boy who cried wolf, whereby everybody is accused of being far right if they’re not expressing extremely left-wing views – and that probably covers most of the working-class population of this country.
“Some of the things we hear from the Left now are so absurd you’re sort of thinking, ‘Have I taken crazy pills? That makes no sense.’ But it’s the same on the Right. Some of these extremes that they go to, you’re thinking, ‘You can’t be serious?’ But ultimately, what if there was a reason for that? So what if someone was making that happen? And they were making that happen so a third way that would otherwise be unacceptable is suddenly acceptable?”
That third way, at least in the fictional story brilliantly conceived by the pair, is the return of the Nazis.
Revenge of Odessa cleverly features the grandson of Forsyth’s original hero, reporter Peter Miller, played on screen by Jon Voight in the 1974 film.
Freddie Forsyth and Tony Kent worked together on Revenge of Odessa (Image: -)
Set in the summer of 2025, Georg Miller is a Berlin reporter who stumbles across evidence that Odessa has resurfaced – in fact, that they never went away.
Instead, they have been worming their way into positions of power in Germany and elsewhere. A series of apparently unconnected events – a US senator burned to death, a mass shooting by Islamist terrorists at a Stuttgart football match and an old man murdered in the dementia ward of a German hospital – ring warning bells.
And when Miller starts joining the dots, he finds himself targeted by killers from the Nazi organisation exposed by his grandfather three decades earlier.
Kent also introduces British spy Scott Brogan – an ageing and utterly ruthless operator with the practical skills to help Georg take on Odessa.
“I love the idea of a hero who in any book would be your villain. It just so happens that this time, through some quirk of fate, Scott’s on the side of the angels,” he explains.
“Whereas otherwise, he would be the absolute b*****d you’re up against. He’s based on a former special forces guy I know and you would not want to mess with this man.” He adds with a smile: “I must tell him he’s in it before he reads it!”
Kent first met Freddie at a Berkshire Rotary Club dinner when he watched the author deliver “the single best after dinner speech I’ve ever seen”.
“I was sitting there writing notes on napkins,” he smiles today.
“His command of the room was incredible. Halfway through the night, he asked, ‘So what is it you do?’ It turns out he thought I was from the local bookshop.”
In the event, the pair found plenty of common ground.
“I’m not a believer in Right or Left – I’m a believer in correct or incorrect,” says Kent.
“When the previous government was in power people assumed I was very left-wing because of my objections to much of what the Conservatives were doing.
“Equally, anyone who’s followed me on X (formerly Twitter) for the last year now assumes I’m fascist because of my objections to what Labour are doing. But I just think if something’s wrong, it’s wrong.”
Having bonded over their writing, the pair teamed up after Kent co-founded the Chiltern Kills Crime Writing Festival in 2023. Freddie agreed to be its patron and star guest at the inaugural event.
“I was very lucky to know him,” says Kent today. “What I was surprised to find out is that he actually was reading my books.”
In fact, it was Freddie who suggested Kent for the role of co-writer on Odessa. It was an inspired choice. For Kent, teaming up with one of his literary heroes was a no-brainer. He chuckles: “It was the fastest ‘yes’ of all time. I went through disbelief and amazement in about a millisecond and then just said, ‘Yes.’
“I’ll say this now because they can’t take the contract away… but I would have done it for free.”
The son of Irish immigrants, Kent grew up in a tight-knit family on a north-west London council estate. With an older brother in trouble with the police, he credits boxing with keeping him on the straight and narrow. He spent 11 years at London’s leading criminal chambers, 2 Bedford Row, before moving into the private sector at Ewing Law.
Tony Kent was a Freddie Forsyth fan before he began working with him (Image: Neil Spence)
Years ago, in a Ruislip pub near where he grew up, an old schoolmate asked what he was doing. “When I said I’d just graduated from bar school he assumed I was a barman,” he smiles. The father-of-one was 22 when he wrote the first four chapters of his debut thriller and shoved them into a drawer. The novel was finally published in 2018, as Killer Intent.
Since then, Kent has published four more edge-of-your-seat thrillers featuring military intelligence officer Joe Dempsey and Belfast-born criminal barrister Michael Devlin.
While he is sometimes described as the British David Baldacci, the US lawyer-turned bestselling thriller writer, Freddie had always been a major inspiration. Kent recalls an uncle giving him a box of second-hand books from a car boot sale.
“I remember reading The Day of the Jackal and thinking, ‘I don’t need to read any more of these books’, because it was like someone playing football so many leagues above everyone else,” he smiles.
“The first time I met Freddie, he told me how quickly he’d written it – in something like 35 days. When you consider that, for a first book, to write it in six weeks, and to have no one change a word… it’s literally perfect, no one’s ever going to do that again.
“His first three books were all like that – he invented the assassination thriller with The Jackal, then he did the Nazis with Odessa, and with The Dogs of War he came up with the idea of mercenaries.
“He was on fire.”
For the Odessa sequel, Freddie had written a four or five-page synopsis.
“Just general ideas of where the book would go,” explains Kent.
“It was a matter of bringing it up to date, making it contemporary, and ultimately we created a 50-page mini-book.”
Replicating Freddie’s voice, however, proved tough initially. “Early Freddie is the greatest writer of the time. I tried to write as a 1970s Freddie. I tried to use Freddie’s voice and I discovered after two weeks of failing that he is the literary equivalent of Frank Sinatra when you’re doing karaoke.
“In the same way you realise ‘Oh my God, that man can sing’, Freddie’s the same. It doesn’t feel like he’s writing – it’s effortless. But when you try to write like him, you discover just how difficult it is.
“So I gave up trying to sound like Freddie, – but I did try to write like Freddie, which means I tried to pack the book full of suspense.”
Was he concerned about the famously blunt author not liking his work?
“I was terrified,” Kent smiles.
“Everyone is a bit scared when they put a book out there, because you have to convince yourself it’s ready to be published. To do that with Freddie, to give him a book, I was waiting to be torn apart.”
Thankfully, despite his illness, Freddie was able to read the finished book and happily signed it off.
“It was all about making sure Freddie was happy,” adds Kent, who is busy writing another Odessa sequel he’s not allowed to discuss – unsurprisingly so, given the cliff-hanger ending of Revenge of Odessa.
Other projects may also arise, based on their conversations.
“We spoke about a number of projects,” Kent adds. “Nothing’s official as it stands, but we spent a lot of time looking at what’s in his backlist and what could be taken forward. With Odessa, there’s obviously potential there for the future. With the Jackal, I actually think a prequel could make an interesting project.”
Watch this space!
- Revenge of Odessa by Freddie Forsyth with Tony Kent (Bantam, £22) is out now
Revenge of Odessa by Frederick Forsyth with Tony Kent (Image: -)