Frederick Forsyth, who used his early experience as a British foreign correspondent and occasional intelligence operative as fodder for a series of swashbuckling, best-selling thrillers in the 1970s and ’80s, including “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” died on Monday at his home in Jordans, a village north of London. He was 86.
His literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, did not specify a cause, saying only that Mr. Forsyth’s death followed a short illness.
Mr. Forsyth was a master of the geopolitical nail-biter, writing novels embedded in an international demimonde populated by spies, mercenaries and political extremists. He wrote 24 books, including 14 novels, and sold more than 75 million copies.
His stories often juxtapose a single individual against sprawling networks of power and money — an unnamed assassin against the French government in “The Day of the Jackal” (1971), a lone British reporter against a shadowy conspiracy to protect ex-Nazi officers in “The Odessa File” (1972).
“It’s one man against a huge machine,” he told The Times of London in 2024, explaining why so many readers of “The Day of the Jackal” sided with a hit man intent on killing French President Charles de Gaulle, instead of with the authorities. “We don’t like machines, so one guy even trying to kill a human being, taking on this vast machine of government, secret intelligence service, police and so on, has appeal.”
Though he set many of his best works during the Cold War of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Forsyth often chose stories and characters operating apart from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry — in post-colonial conflicts in Africa, for example, or in the hunt for ex-Nazis in Europe.
But he also made the occasional foray into Cold War espionage, ground that was zealously guarded by his main literary rival, John le Carré. Mr. Forsyth’s novel “The Fourth Protocol” (1984), which many critics considered his best, offered a twisting tale of nuclear espionage and radical-left politics in Britain.
His books regularly topped the best-seller lists, and many were turned into movies within a few years of their debut. A film version of “The Day of the Jackal,” starring Edward Fox, appeared in 1973, just two years after the novel’s publication; a second movie version, with Bruce Willis and Sidney Poitier, was released in 1997 as “The Jackal.” (A television series based on the novel, starring Eddie Redmayne, aired last year.)
Mr. Forsyth came by his subjects through extensive firsthand experience. Eschewing college after high school, he joined the Royal Air Force, where he flew fighter jets.
He then worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, where he covered the attempted assassination in 1962 of de Gaulle by far-right militants angry over France’s withdrawal from Algeria — fuel for “The Day of the Jackal,” his first novel.
In 1965, Mr. Forsyth moved to the BBC, where he covered a civil war in Nigeria between the central, dictatorial government and the breakaway state of Biafra. In 2015, he revealed that while in Africa he had also worked as an informant for British intelligence.
Mr. Forsyth’s reporting on Biafra led to two books, the nonfiction “The Biafra Story” (1969) and “The Dogs of War” (1974), about a group of mercenaries hired by a shady industrialist to stage a coup against a resources-rich African country.
Though he won praise for his taut prose and meticulous research, Mr. Forsyth downplayed his writing skills.
“I don’t even like writing,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1978. “The action of it is very tiring, then you’re shut away like some damn monk, on a glorious day, with the sun shining.”
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was born on Aug. 25, 1938, in Ashford, a town southeast of London. His parents, Frederick and Phyllis (Green) Forsyth, worked in a fur business owned by his mother’s family; his father was also a shopkeeper.
Though a decent student and fluent in French, German and Spanish, Frederick had no interest in academics; he later boasted that he never read “the classics.” Instead, he sought adventure, something his parents encouraged.
“My father’s advice — if you want an interesting life, bloody well go out and get one — was good. I did,” he told The Daily Mail in 2018. “And I’m glad I did.”
He quit school and joined the military; in the months while he waited to begin his service, he trained as a bull fighter in Spain.
He became a pilot at 19, but left after his three-year commitment because the military could not guarantee him a career flying frontline fighter jets. Seeking a job that would offer the same level of excitement, he chose journalism.
After a three-year apprenticeship at The Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, England, he joined Reuters as a roving diplomatic correspondent, a job that provided material for both future novels and endless cocktail-party anecdotes.
In 1962, he was assigned to follow de Gaulle, not because of what the French president was doing, but because his decision to leave Algeria had fomented a violent response from the country’s far right and talk of a coup.
“We were all waiting for the mega-story,” Mr. Forsyth wrote in the newspaper the Express in 2015, “the moment when a sniper got him through the forehead.”
Later, he was reporting from East Berlin when he saw long columns of Soviet troops headed west. He quickly filed a story and, as he liked to tell it, almost started a war.
“Apparently, I woke up the whole of the Western world,” he told NPR in 2015. “What they found out, around dawn, by ringing up Moscow and saying, ‘What the hell are you doing,’ was that it was the rehearsal for the May Day parade!”
The BBC hired him in 1965, and two years later sent him to Nigeria to cover the outbreak of the Biafran War. Mr. Forsyth reported on the atrocities committed by the Nigerian government, which was supported by Britain.
When his editors at the BBC tried to rein him in, he resigned in protest and returned to Africa as a freelance journalist. He also began providing information to MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency.
Mr. Forsyth’s work for British intelligence eventually went beyond merely providing information. In 1973, he traveled to Dresden, then in communist East Germany, to retrieve a package from a Russian mole.
At the time, the future Russian President Vladimir V. Putin ran the Dresden office of the K.G.B., and Mr. Forsyth claimed that Mr. Putin had almost caught him as he tried to flee the city.
“He thought he would stop me himself, but he quartered the wrong road,” he told The Times of London in 2024. “I wasn’t on that road. I was on the other one. So I got through the border with about 10 minutes to spare. Or maybe less.”
Mr. Forsyth always said he considered himself a journalist first; he turned to fiction, he said, only when he found himself broke and jobless. While staying with a friend in London, he wrote “The Day of the Jackal” in just 35 days.
The book became a runaway hit in Britain and the United States, and it announced Mr. Forsyth as a major new voice.
“It makes such comparable books as ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’ seem like Hardy Boys mysteries,” wrote the critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times.
Mr. Forsyth’s first marriage, to Carole Cunningham, ended in divorce. He married Sandy Molloy in 1994. She died in 2024. He is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Stuart and Shane, and four grandchildren.
Mr. Forsyth would spend six months researching a book before writing a single word, a method that showed in his attention to detail — for example, the minutely described process by which the assassin in “The Day of the Jackal” constructs a rifle that he can break down and hide inside a wooden leg.
Many of his plots and characters were ripped from real life. While researching “The Odessa File,” he interviewed Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter.
Mr. Wiesenthal suggested that he use a real Nazi fugitive, Eduard Roschmann, the so-called Butcher of Riga, in the book.
As Mr. Forsyth recounted in his 2015 memoir, “The Outsider,” when the film version of “The Odessa File” was shown in a small town in Argentina, someone in the audience recognized the Roschmann character (played by Maximilian Schell) as his neighbor and turned him in.
Mr. Roschmann fled the country but died of a heart attack at the border. He was buried in a gravel pit. Mr. Forsyth said he hoped they tossed a copy of his book into the grave.
Mr. Forsyth wrote a regular column for the Express for 20 years, filing his last one in 2023. He used his column to express his idiosyncratically conservative political views: He was fundamentally antiwar, calling for Tony Blair’s impeachment over his support for the Gulf War, but was also a vocal supporter of the Brexit campaign to leave the European Union in 2016.
Having made an early fortune with his first books, Mr. Forsyth frequently considered retiring, and often made headlines with promises to do so. Most recently, he told The Guardian in 2016 that his memoir would be his last book.
“I ran out of things to say,” he said, adding that his wife told him, “You’re far too old, these places are bloody dangerous and you don’t run as avidly, as nimbly as you used to.”
But his retirement was short-lived. He published another novel, “The Fox,” in 2018. And in November, Penguin Random House will publish a sequel to “The Odessa File,” called “Revenge of Odessa,” which Mr. Forsyth wrote with Tony Kent.
Sopan Deb contributed reporting.
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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