True-life drama for Frederick Forsyth
Aug 20 2010 By Hannah Stephenson
Best-selling novelist Frederick Forsyth is more like one of his characters than one might believe, writes Hannah Stephenson.
Top author Frederick Forsyth has had more brushes with danger during his career than most of us have had hot dinners.
He’s been arrested and interrogated by police in East Germany, tailed and bugged by the KGB in Moscow and shot at by Nigerians in Biafra. But it’s all in a day’s work for the man who brought us The Day Of The Jackal, The Odessa File and other stories about assassins, mercenaries, terrorists and kidnappers.
The 71-year-old author says he had another close shave last year, while researching his latest book, The Cobra.
His trip to Guinea-Bissau, West Africa – or that “war-ravaged, gutted hell-hole” as Forsyth describes it – was rather eventful.
“While I was airborne someone blew the chief of the Army to pieces with a bomb under his desk. As I landed at 2am, the vengeful army was heading into town to seek retribution.”
Later that night, Forsyth was woken in his hotel room by the sound of a bomb exploding 500 yards away. It seemed that the earlier murder has sparked a revenge killing, and President Joao Bernardo Vieira had been shot at his presidential villa and then hacked to death with machetes.
The former Reuters foreign correspondent recalls: “Borders and airports were immediately closed so I had a world exclusive. Great fun at 71. Quite like old times.”
Hours later he was recounting the events on the BBC before returning to his research.
Forsyth was visiting the former Portuguese colony, a key transit point for cocaine being smuggled to Europe, to research his latest thriller which sees a former CIA operative given a free rein to do whatever it takes to fight the cocaine cartels and win the war on drugs.
He says he doesn’t get anxious when travelling to volatile countries for research, but he does take care.
“I’m not exactly scared, but a bit wary. The trick is to have a feasible cover story and to keep beaming, shaking hands and standing rounds of beer. Stoned African soldiers are the worst – completely unpredictable.”
Despite his frightening encounters with soldiers and corrupt police, he says the worst danger he faces when visiting far-flung places is tropical diseases.
“In Bissau last year I picked up a blood infection that nearly cost me my left leg. I arrived back at Harley Street just in time.”
