Death was never far the lips of Frederick Forsyth at this Guardian Live event. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the thriller writer with book sales of 70m has had plenty of adventures himself – and several brushes with extreme danger. His latest book, the story of his own life, is another page-turner.
Forsyth recalled with remarkable blitheness an accident in which he overturned a car. He almost lost a hand and completely lost an ear. “It was stitched back on,” he said, tugging it as if to prove its existence.
The 77-year-old novelist came across in the flesh as something of an aged James Bond, who has had his own romances, gadgets, and perhaps even a newspaper with eyeholes cut out of it. On a gloomy night in Camden, north London, he was in conversation with Mark Lawson about The Outsider, an autobiography – though he cringes at the word. “There is no story, just a hell of a lot of anecdotes,” he protested.
Desperate to fly a Spitfire, he lied about his age in the 50s to qualify for national service. But the RAF didn’t fulfil his big dream and it wasn’t until this year that he flew one for the first time.
He also once avoided being raped at knifepoint in Paris – by pulling out a bigger knife.
Forsyth has been a foreign correspondent, an “asset” as he put it – not a spy, despite recent headlines – and a bit of a ladykiller. With a stately Britishness, he admitted to being bewildered by technology, but knows the best way to infiltrate a white supremacist gang in South Africa.
Here are some other revelations from the night:
1. He almost started world war three
Always start a chapter with a bang, and Forsyth does in The Outsider: “I recall the day I almost started world war three with exact accuracy, for reasons that will become plain.”
It was 24 April 1964, 2am, in East Berlin, after a night with a “charming young member of the state opera chorus.” Forsyth was driving his car down dark streets, until he was stopped by a Russian soldier. Then appeared columns of infantry, artillery, armoured cars, all moving towards the Berlin wall.
His reaction? “‘Strewth’,” Forsyth said. He watched as more tanks and artillery joined the column, then rushed to his apartment and wondered what the hell to do. “The only thing I could do was report exactly what I saw, only this is what is happening here, tonight.”
He wrote the story in a dispatch to Reuters in London, where it was passed from the top editorial staff to the MoD. It travelled all the way up to Washington, until someone contacted Moscow and back came the boring explanation: it was a rehearsal for the coming May Day parade, conducted in the night to avoid blocking traffic.
“I learned later I had woken up half of the British government and made Washington have a coffee after dinner,” he chuckled. “A veritable tsunami of derision fell on my head, but it was never mentioned again.”
2. He wasn’t an MI6 spy... he was an asset
Despite recent headlines, Forsyth is keen to make the distinction: he wasn’t a spy for MI6, but an asset.
“There was nothing weird about it; it was the Cold War” he chuckled. “An awful lot of the strength of British intelligence came from the number volunteers. A businessman might be going to a trade fair in a difficult to enter city and he’d be approached, quite gently, with a courteous ‘If you would be so kind to accept an envelope under your hotel door and bring it home...’ so that was what I did. I ran errands.”
He never did this while he was a BBC journalist, he is keen to stress: after quitting and returning from a freelancing stint in Biafra, Nigeria, he was approached in an ice-cream parlour and asked if he would return and clarify the suffering of local children. So he did.
His later career as a novelist made disguising himself even easier, as he could claim he was researching a book. The novelist cover was “superb” as he explored 1970s Rhodesia and infiltrated white supremacist groups in 1980s South Africa, but he also had another advantage: what he calls his “Bertie Wooster act”.
“One way to appear harmless is to appear dim,” he said, citing PG Wodehouse’s “affable, but thick as a plank” protagonist as a excellent disguise for an Englishman. “The image of the ineffectual Englishman is extremely popular, so if you pretend that is what you are, they think you are too stupid and vulnerable to be harmful.”
3. The Day of the Jackal was written in one draft
Both the title and the contents have not been changed since Forsyth got his first publishing deal. “What you read today is in fact the original manuscript, so I must have got something right,” he said. He wrote the book in 35 days, and started his habit of never doing a second draft. “I don’t understand second drafts, let alone the 17th, like Jeffrey [Archer] does. He told me once he writes the first page and doesn’t know what will happen on the second; I don’t know how he can work that way.”
Jackal was turned away by publisher after publisher, until Charles de Gaulle conveniently died at the end of 1970, while he was hawking the manuscript. It sold well in the UK and US, but sales were initially tepid in France until de Gaulle’s culture minster, André Malraux said it was a true depiction of the man he knew. “After that, it took off in France in quite a big way,” Forsyth said with a shrug.
4. His novels are proofread by ‘powers that be’
Given his place in several historic and significant political moments, does he have to ask permission to write about them in novels? “In principle, yes,” Forsyth said, then fell silent, prompting laughter. Did he sign the Official Secrets Act? “Several times, probably.”
He expanded. “I’ve never knowingly put anything dangerous in my novels because it is either technically too dangerous to reveal to the public how it is done – like making a bomb – or it is a piece of trade craft that is still being used. If I ever came near anything dangerous, I’d print off those pages and bung them down to a friend who would get them to a certain office and they’d come back a week later with: ‘Freddy, old boy, don’t mention this’. So I’d cut that out.”
5. This is his last book
Mark Lawson said he had interviewed Forsyth over a number of years and this was “our third final interview”, adding: “But is this the real Frank Sinatra farewell tour?” We’ll have to wait and see on that one.
Forsyth certainly feels he is something of a dinosaur. “The world is becoming very technically complex. I can’t understand half of it,” he said. While researching his last novel, The Kill List, he met some specialists to ask them questions about MoD technology. “I didn’t understand a word of it,” he recalls. “They might as well been speaking ancient Greek. And they looked at me as if I was defective.
“The way GCHQ do it now, the way they are listening to half a snatched conversation in Yemen; the way a man in Nevada can steer a drone into a car containing a top ISIL man and he is gone in a puff of smoke perceived by none in the middle of nowhere... it is a new warfare beyond me, and past me. I am another generation.”
Frederick Forsyth was in conversation with Mark Lawson at a Guardian Live event. Find out what other events are coming up and how to book tickets.
