Page Eighteen

1. Source

The subject flew for the Royal Air Force, reportedly its youngest pilot at nineteen, then went to Reuters and worked Paris, East Berlin and Prague. He covered the attempts on de Gaulle’s life from close range. He moved to the BBC, was sent to Nigeria to report a small war expected to last a fortnight, disagreed profoundly with the line his employers wished him to take on Biafra, resigned and went back on his own money. He came home in 1970 broke, with no job and no prospects, and wrote a novel in thirty-five days about the assassination of a president who, as every reader knew before opening the book, did not die.

Decades later, in his memoir, he confirmed what had long been suspected: that for something over twenty years he ran errands for the Secret Intelligence Service, unpaid, on the reasonable grounds that a foreign correspondent goes to the same places a spy would like to go and attracts less attention doing it.

This matters for the assessment. Forsyth was not an intelligence officer writing fiction, and not a novelist doing research. He was a working reporter with access, and the fourteen novels are what happens when a reporter’s methods are applied to invented events. He does not imagine how something would be done. He finds out, and then writes it down.

2. Method

Open the first novel at almost any page and the technique is visible. A man walks through three English village churchyards until he finds the gravestone of a child who died at two and a half and would now be roughly his own age. He calls on the vicar, presents himself as an amateur genealogist, admires the Norman architecture, contributes to the restoration fund, and comes away with what he needs. He applies for a passport in the dead child’s name, forges the referee’s signature with a thin nib and a printing set, and destroys the death certificate. Four days later the passport arrives in the post.

That is roughly two pages, and it is entirely correct. British passport procedure was reportedly tightened afterwards. The same book takes you through commissioning a one-off rifle from a Brussels gunsmith who is delighted by the constraints, and through a forger’s explanation of why a photograph should be a poor likeness rather than a good one, because the official looks at the face first and then hunts the picture for points of similarity. The third novel walks you through buying four hundred sub-machine guns quite legally with a Spanish end-user certificate, and was read in some quarters as a manual for staging a coup.

The consequence is a kind of suspense nobody else has managed. In the first novel you know from history that de Gaulle survives. The tension does not come from the outcome. It comes from watching two professionals, the assassin and the small tired policeman hunting him, each doing his job faultlessly, and from the certainty that one of them must be doing it slightly better. Forsyth discovered that if the procedure is real enough, the reader will supply the anxiety himself.

3. Personnel

Now to the man you asked about, because he is the clearest specimen in the file. Forsyth does not introduce Quinn. He has a committee introduce him. In the Cabinet Room, with the President’s son in the hands of kidnappers, the Vice-President and the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary sit passing round a dossier gouged out of the files at Langley with additions from the Pentagon, and we read it over their shoulders. Born on a farm in Delaware. Mother dead when he was ten. Infantry at eighteen, Special Forces two years later, Vietnam four months after that, five years there. Fluent Vietnamese, self-taught, a rarity among the military. Flown in for the Son Tay raid because they needed someone who could speak to a guard. No first name on record. Even his intimates call him Quinn.

The Attorney-General reads further and remarks, mildly, it also says here he hates violence. The Secretary of State says that he hates violence too. And then somebody says: yes, but you haven’t read page eighteen.

Page eighteen is an encounter on the Mekong that two men came out of alive, because Quinn carried the other one forty miles on his back. The man died of his wounds at Da Nang. There were no witnesses left, so there was no Medal of Honor, only a Silver Star, two Bronze and five Purple Hearts.

That is the Forsyth hero entire, and it is why Quinn is the best of them. Modest origins. One extraordinary skill. Decorated but unrecognised, because the witnesses died. A first-rate mind with no education behind it. And a settled, unshowy competence that the men around the table cannot match and know they cannot match. When Quinn later refuses to accept the kidnappers’ opening demand, he explains himself in one cold paragraph: agree the first figure and the man thinks he should have asked for more, and a man who believes he has been fooled becomes angry, and he has nobody to be angry with except the hostage. Expertise, delivered flat, saving a life. Nobody in the genre does that better.

The same pattern runs through all fourteen. The Jackal, anonymous by design. Cat Shannon out of County Tyrone by way of the Royal Marines and the Congo. Peter Miller, a freelance reporter with a dead man’s diary. Claude Lebel, the small unremarkable policeman. Mike Martin, the SAS major who can pass as an Arab. Sam McCready. Cal Dexter, tunnel rat and legal-aid lawyer. And they quietly inhabit one world: the OAS colonel who commissions the Jackal is remembered years later by a German mercenary in another book, and the Martin brothers who run the Gulf War novel of 1994 come back twelve years afterwards for the Afghanistan one.

4. Assessment

The first four novels are the achievement. The 1971 assassination story invented the modern procedural thriller and has not been bettered at its own game. The Nazi-hunting novel of 1972 sends an ordinary reporter after a real war criminal and folds a genuine survivor’s testimony into the fiction. The mercenary novel of 1974 is so exact about the logistics of overthrowing a small state that it made people uncomfortable. The 1979 tanker novel is the most ambitious.

After that, two peaks. The 1984 Cold War novel, in which a security officer and a Soviet illegal assemble the same device from opposite ends of Europe, and the 1994 Gulf War novel, which is the best-informed book about that war by anybody. Between them sits the Quinn novel, and after them a set of four linked novellas that let Forsyth do what he does best at the length that suits it.

Then the decline, which is worth stating plainly. The 1996 Russian novel and the 2006 Afghanistan one are still full-strength, and the second of those has a real dramatic engine, since its hero is impersonating a prisoner who may be recognised in any room he enters. But the last four thin out. By 2010 the closing stretch of the cocaine novel is barely a novel at all, more a superbly organised global situation report with the scenes taken out. By 2018 the book is short and much of it consists of an adviser briefing a Prime Minister over lunch about missile engines and appeasement. The method has eaten the fiction.

The permanent limitations should be admitted too. The characters are dossiers rather than psychologies, and Forsyth is entirely aware of it; he gives you the file because he believes the file is the truth about a man. Women are thinly drawn throughout. The politics harden with age. And there is almost no consolation anywhere. The first novel ends with an unnamed foreigner buried in an unmarked suburban grave, attended by a priest, a registrar, two grave-diggers and one solitary little figure who declines to give his name and goes home to his wife and children.

The day of the Jackal was over.

5. Recommendation

Begin with The Day of the Jackal (1971). There is no argument to be had about this. Follow it with The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974) and you will have the case for Forsyth in three books.

Then take the two later peaks: The Fourth Protocol (1984) and The Fist of God (1994). Then The Negotiator (1989) for Quinn, who deserves the affection he gets. The Deceiver (1991) is four shorter pieces and shows the method working at its natural length.

Of the last six, two are worth anyone’s time: Icon (1996) and The Afghan (2006). The rest are for completists, and they are instructive in their own way, because they show the machinery running with the casing off.

Read the memoir, The Outsider (2015), alongside any of them. It explains where the access came from.

And here is the thing the file cannot tell you, which you have to read him to understand. Forsyth spent fifty years insisting that a man is best described by his record: where he was born, what he trained on, what he did and what it cost. It sounds like a limitation, and in the weaker books it is one. In the strong ones it turns out to be a kind of respect. He does not tell you what Quinn feels. He tells you what Quinn did on the Mekong, and lets you work out the rest.

Read page eighteen. Every time.