Short read: ‘He changed the rules for all of us who came after’: Lee Child remembers Frederick Forsyth

For some of us, teenage years wouldn’t have been the same without Frederick Forsyth’s thriller novels, many of whom have been adapted into movies and now TV series (check out The Day of the Jackal ft. Eddie Redmayne). As Forsyth passed away earlier this week, tributes are pouring in. We feature this one from someone whose own thriller novels we have enjoyed reading – Lee Child of Jack Reacher fame. Also, Lee’s tribute appeals to us at Marcellus as it highlights Forsyth’s ability to go against conventional thinking. Here, he talks about the Day of the Jackal:

“It was a twin-track thriller – an assassin hunts his target while law enforcement hunts the assassin. But the intended victim was Charles de Gaulle, a real person, the president of France, who had been in the news almost daily until his death in 1970, from an aneurysm. Therefore we all knew the assassin had failed. How did that not short-circuit the will-he-won’t-he suspense that thrillers seemed to require?

And the main character was an absolute cipher – a completely blank slate. No backstory, no history, no explanation, no reason, no justification. No description. Not even a name. Yet we all rooted for him. We secretly admired him. We wanted him to succeed.

How-to books about writing tell us to create sympathetic, fleshed-out characters, and then place them in great peril, and leave the outcome uncertain until the last page. Forsyth ignored all that. In so doing, he showed us that the how question was as powerful as the who, why, where and when. He showed us that intriguing detail and inside information was compelling in itself. He created a year-zero thriller that reset the whole genre.”

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