Two years ago, essayist and short story writer Kevin Mims contributed a post to this site about the work of Frederick Forsyth. He’s clearly a big fan of the best-selling English thriller writer, although he prefers the author’s earlier works to those released in the 2000s. In this post, however, he takes a second, more favorable look at those later works. —Janet Hutchings
Das blaue Sofa, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Back in September of 2021, I wrote an essay for this blog about Frederick Forsyth’s 1982 short story collection No Comebacks, which I consider a masterpiece. Towards the end of that essay I noted that, “The last Forsyth novel I was able to finish was The Phantom of Manhattan , published in 1999…The newer stuff seems mired in excess data, though opinions on that may vary.” Shortly after that essay was published I began to feel a bit ashamed of myself. Had I actually read any of these later books? No. I ran into a rough patch with Forsyth in the mid 1990s. His 1991 novel The Deceiver (actually a collection of linked novellas about a British spymaster named Sam McCready) was one of my favorites, possibly my absolute favorite of his books, although there is a lot of competition for that title. But after that I began to struggle. My problems began with the one-two punch of (no pun intended) The Fist of God (1994) and Icon (1996), which were connected by certain recurring characters and themes. The books seemed to have been written in a period of time when Forsyth was feeling particularly ungenerous towards America’s intelligence services. In these two books, Forsyth seems frequently to be comparing American-style intelligence gathering (largely electronic and highly technical) with the British style (one-on-one personal relationships between field agents and their foreign assets) and finding the Americans wanting. I have no trouble with books that criticize America. But in Fist of God and Icon , I felt as if the author were beating me on the head with his favorite hobbyhorse.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, seem to have triggered in Forsyth a renewed sense of fondness for America and Americans. It’s not as if he was ever anti-American. Like a lot of British spy novelists, Forsyth tends to treat M16’s “American cousins” (i.e. U.S. intelligence operatives) as somewhat foolhardy and patronizing but also brave and reliable. But after 9/11, he seems to have gained a great deal of sympathy for America, as well as a greater appreciation of just how much work goes into trying to defend the country from its many foreign enemies. Defending a relatively small island nation like Great Britain from terrorists is difficult enough. But defending a vast land mass with hundreds of millions of people in it is a great deal more difficult, which probably explains why the CIA relies more heavily on technology than on humint (intelligence gained by human operatives in the field). After 9/11, Forsyth’s thrillers took on a decidedly more friendly tone towards America and its military, its government, and its intelligence services.
Avenger , published in 2003, is the best of Forsyth’s twenty-first century novels. The plot was designed to illustrate the need for CIA agents to deal with small-fry thugs in order to bring down much larger thugs. The set-up is ingenious. Calvin Dexter is a lawyer and a former U.S. Army “tunnel rat” who, during the Vietnam War, descended into the ingenious labyrinth of tunnels that the North Vietnamese Army employed for sneaking behind enemy lines and pulling off all sorts of successful guerilla actions against the U.S. and South Vietnamese Armies. As the novel opens, Dexter is offered a job by a Canadian billionaire named Stephen Edmonds. Several years earlier Edmonds’s eighteen-year-old grandson had volunteered to travel to Bosnia and help out the innocent civilian victims of the Bosnian War (which lasted from 1992 to 1995). The boy disappeared in Bosnia and his grandfather wants to know how and why. Dexter travels to Bosnia and engages in some thrilling detective work. Eventually he learns that the grandson was killed in gruesome fashion by a sadistic Serbian warlord named Zilic. The grandfather wants Dexter—aka “Avenger”—to track down Zilic and make him pay for his crime—extra-judicially, of course. In early 2001, Dexter begins tracking Zilic to the Central American compound where he now lives comfortably thanks to the CIA, which has bought him off because of the intelligence he has delivered on other villains. As Dexter is closing in on Zilic, he doesn’t know that Zilic is in the process of helping the CIA nab a particularly nefarious terrorist named Osama bin Laden. Zilic and bin Laden are acquaintances and Zilic is setting up a meeting with the Saudi Arabian terrorist at which CIA agents will be waiting to kill or capture him. Naturally all of this is happening in the late summer of 2001. Thus the reader finds his loyalties curiously mixed. We’ve waited all book long for a showdown between Dexter and Zilic, a showdown in which Dexter delivers to Zilic the kind of painful retribution he deserves for what he did to Stephen Edmonds’s grandson and plenty of other victims. But at the same time, we’d love to see Osama bin Laden caught or killed before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks can be carried out. So we find ourselves both rooting for Zilic’s death, and yet still hoping that Dexter fails so that Zilic can help deliver a much bigger villain into the hands of the CIA.
Forsyth followed it up with The Afghan , published in 2006. Unfortunately, this one is a sequel of sorts to The Fist of God , one of my least favorite Forsyth novels. The Afghan was shorter and, in my opinion, much more readable than The Fist of God , but it is my least favorite of the final five.
The Cobra , published in 2010, was the twelfth of Frederick Forsyth’s fourteen novels. Although not quite up to the standards of the novels he produced in the 1970s and 1980s, The Cobra is nonetheless a thrilling adventure novel. This is another right-wing fantasy in which a team of noble pragmatists decide to ignore such niceties as civil rights and judicial procedure and simply go out and destroy an enemy of the Western world, in this case a South American cocaine cartel and its drug-lord leader. Curiously, this group of extra-judicial warriors is brought into existence by none other than U.S. President Barack Obama.
Next, in 2013, came The Kill List . Once again, we have a lone good guy possessed of almost supernatural skills in the art of finding and killing international terrorists. This hero’s name is Kit Carson, but that name (thankfully) is rarely used in the novel. Forsyth tells us that, when his parents gave Kit that name, “the reference to the old frontiersman was entirely coincidental.” Sure. Carson uses a few different aliases when he is on the trail of a villain, but Forsyth usually just refers to him as the Tracker (the real Kit Carson, of course, was a famous tracker). In fact, most of the important characters in the book are known primarily by nicknames. The villain is called the Preacher. He is an Islamic terrorist who uses the internet to broadcast hateful Islamic sermons to his followers and urge them to commit acts of terrorism on the West, particularly Great Britain and the U.S. (Forsyth admirably points out that the Preacher’s understanding of Islam is a complete—and intentional—misreading of the Prophet Mohammad).
In 2018, Forsyth brought out The Fox , his final novel (he has stated in interviews that he is no longer writing fiction). In The Fox , he gives us a title character (real name: Luke Jennings) who is a young computer wizard who uses his skills to wreak havoc on foreign despots in Russia and Iran. Making his title character a computer wiz was an unfortunate choice because Forsyth appears to know little about computers. Although I am twenty years younger than Forsyth, I too am completely ignorant of computers. But even I found myself rolling my eyes at some of the magical things The Fox was able to do with computers.
Considering how off the mark the technical details in The Fox are, you might be surprised by the fact that it managed to earn even 3.8 stars from the Goodreads crowd. That slightly-above-average rating is a testament to Forsyth’s other storytelling gifts. Even when his computer-knowledge fails him, he knows how to set up exciting action sequences. Both Russia and Iran send secret hit squads after Luke Jennings, and Forsyth creates some great suspense as British forces try to neutralize them before they can kill the Fox. I enjoyed the novel and found its 336 pages flying by. The novel doesn’t come close to matching such masterpieces as The Day of Jackal , The Odessa File , or The Fourth Protocol , but it isn’t really trying to. The book seems to be written for fans of the Jason Bourne films and the Mission: Impossible franchise. It is lightweight and frothy in the manner of a silly action movie. If you approach it the way you would a James Bond film, you’re not likely to go away disappointed.
If, like me, you gave up on Forsyth sometime in the late twentieth century, you made a mistake. I urge you to follow my lead and atone for that error. Even the lesser works of a great master are generally better than average.
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