This is an archive article published on September 16, 2016

Opinion The thrill is gone

Frederick Forsyth abandons fiction for want of fact. What’s the difference, then?

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September 16, 2016 12:04 AM IST First published on: Sep 16, 2016 at 12:04 AM IST

Frederick Forsyth is giving up on thrillers because his wife has barred him from making any more dangerous journeys, and the Wikipedia entry on Somalia just isn’t lively enough to base a drone attack scene on. It’s a nice backhanded insult to internet culture, which believes that data overload makes up for the sensory deprivation that device dependence imposes on us. But what could be more natural, for a novelist who made his name with sound research done in person, and to hell with the pallid secondary sources?

The Dogs of War was probably Forsyth’s most challenging assignment. At the risk of sudden extinction, he entered the world of arms dealers, gun-runners and mercenaries in the UK, posing as a buyer, and learned how legit arms were diverted to illicit conflicts. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has the big picture, but Forsyth had the nitty-gritty. Very gritty, it was.

Before he found his calling as a paperback writer, Forsyth worked as a combat pilot, journalist and spy. He wrote his first book, The Biafra Story (nonfiction, 1969), as a freelance journalist in Nigeria, where he was recruited by MI6, allegedly on a cipher salary. He must know that journalism, intelligence and certain kinds of fiction are distant cousins. The part of the newspaper story which cannot be told for want of supporting evidence appears in the pages of a paperback. Popular fiction is generally more remunerative than journalistic fact and generates more invitations to posh dinners, but the workflow is similar. Newspaper editors demand verifiable quotes while book editors plead for some imagination, that’s all. It is interesting that one of the world’s most widely read authors, who has also been a newspaper columnist almost all his life, is putting away his typewriter because he trusts experienced reality more than the imagination.