"Behind his mask, the writer is always watching; he cannot help it. He observes, analyzes, takes mental notes, stores nuggets of the talk and behavior around him for later use," says English author Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal; The Odessa File) in the introduction to his memoir, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.
If a fiction writer must rely on nuggets of his own experience for inspiration, Forsyth's life is a goldmine. He fell in love with the Royal Air Force Spitfires that dueled Nazi bombers over his boyhood home in Kent and vowed, against the sternest warnings of his schoolmasters, to join the RAF. By age 19, he had survived multiple misadventures across continental Europe, learned three languages and earned his pilot's wings.
But after flight school the RAF would only let him fly a desk, so Forsyth indulged his wanderlust by becoming a foreign newspaper correspondent. Through apprenticeships, wits and sheer luck, he landed a job at the Reuters Paris bureau in 1962, during the height of the Algerian War crisis. His experiences with the security cordon around Charles de Gaulle, who was then facing assassination attempts by far-right paramilitary nationalists, inspired The Day of the Jackal.
Forsyth's foreign reporting went on to include a stint as Reuters bureau chief in East Berlin, where he nearly caused World War III, and freelance correspondent during the Nigerian Civil War, where he witnessed combat, mass starvation and began his part-time volunteer work for MI6. The Outsider is as thrilling as Forsyth's own fiction. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer