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Frederick Forsyth, Day of the Jackal author and former MI6 agent, dies aged 86

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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