Frederick Forsyth – author of The Day of the Jackal, former spy, master of the thriller genre – sure can tell a story.
He has me gripped with this one, describing how the dashing multi-millionaire protagonist was wooed by his wife – ‘the woman did the corralling, unusually, not the other way round,’ he says – then promptly lost his fortune, leaving them destitute.
Instead of turning tail and running, his heroine (a woman who had her own glamorous backstory; she’d worked as a PA to film star Elizabeth Taylor) stuck with her new husband, convinced he could build a second fortune. So he did.
They lived happily ever after until – in the most tragic of plot twists – she developed an opioid addiction and he nursed her until she died, promising to scatter her ashes in their garden, and look after her Jack Russell and her cat, who were the children she never had.
It’s very unusual to want to reach for a hankie at the end of a Freddie Forsyth story, though, given that they usually feature assassins, covert missions, and macho derring-do. At the risk of being sexist, doesn’t this love story, which ends so tragically, show a side to him that is more feminine?
‘There is another side,’ he agrees, with a chuckle. ‘What you see in my novels is violence and action and espionage and whatever. But that’s not real life, is it?’
The story he has been relating is, of course, real. It is a month since Freddie lost his wife Sandy, a former scriptwriter who had indeed worked as Taylor’s assistant.
They had been together for 36 years and had weathered all the storms (including the one where he lost millions to an embezzler).
For nearly four years Sandy, who was ten years his junior, had battled an addiction to painkillers, and he had watched, powerless, as her organs slowly shut down.
The part of the story where he gets to their final goodbye is simply expressed, and utterly heartbreaking.
‘Towards the very end, in the care home, she regarded her departure as a release and a relief,’ says Freddie. ‘She had no pain, and no lust for life any more.
‘I too became resigned. So we would sit and I would hold her hand, and she would hold mine.
‘We just talked. She knew she was waiting for the end. Life just ebbed away. Each sleep became a little longer. Each period of waking became a little shorter.
‘On the last night, I sat at her bed until 1 am holding her hand. Then she opened one eye and uttered one word: “Go!”.
‘I came home. I didn’t go to bed but sat in the armchair with the phone beside me. At 4.30am it rang and it was the care home.
‘She had passed at 4am. I went back – it was only a ten-minute drive – and there she lay, staring upwards. I kissed her one last time.’
The woman he still affectionately calls his CO (Commanding Officer) died just as his most famous story was being reborn.
The premiere for a reimagined TV version of The Day of the Jackal, written for a new audience and starring Eddie Redmayne as the assassin, was held just days later.
Freddie, a consultant on the project, would always have been accompanied by Sandy on the red carpet; instead he went alone.
Today, we are talking the day after Sandy’s funeral, which was a quiet affair, exactly as she had instructed. ‘The crematorium provided a very nice lady who read a eulogy.
‘There were three pieces of music and the Lord’s Prayer, and the box went through the curtains and that was that. Very short, very dignified, exactly what she wanted.
‘It was my first, and hopefully last, cremation. The next funeral shall be my own.’
In truth, I was stunned Freddie agreed to talk. Who would want to give an interview the morning after his wife’s funeral?
The answer soon emerges: a man who did most of his grieving long before she died.
‘When someone dies from an accident or a heart attack, it’s a shock. The grieving pours in suddenly, I imagine.
‘When you have been going to the care home every day – or at least every second day, as I have been for the last two-ish years, and you know what the outcome will be, because it’s only the timescale that has to be determined – then you grieve before the person dies.’
Before he was a best-selling novelist, Frederick Forsyth was a journalist, and he’s still a hack at heart, driven by deadlines.
There is an urgency about this latest one because the clock is ticking on life itself. He hasn’t written a word, really, since Sandy became ill, but now he wants to write ‘one last book, and it really will be the last’.
‘To write, I need solitude, which I have not had. Now, I’m going to draw an imaginary pair of curtains behind me and look forward, not back. I’m 86. I don’t know how long I have left. Four years? I don’t know.
‘What I do know is that I have to face forward. I have one last story in me. It’s all in my mind. I can see it in word form.
‘Once I can get the final admin done and scatter Sandy’s ashes, then I need to sit at my typewriter – I still use an old electric one, the same way I wrote The Day of the Jackal 50 years ago – and pummel the keyboard.’
He famously wrote that ground-breaking book in 35 days. He was broke, and in a hurry to simply pay the rent. His final work will be shorter (‘more a novella’) and he reckons he only needs ‘maybe ten, 15 or 20 days of peace and quiet’. Then what?
Another chuckle. ‘Then I shall sit on the lawn and drink claret, and go to the pub and do my crossword. And see friends.’
There hasn’t been much socialising lately. ‘No, none. But about 20 or 25 of our friends turned out yesterday. It was quite moving to see them gathered around her.’
This house in Buckinghamshire was lavishly furnished by Sandy (‘she was an Orientalist’), and is still full of her, although, ever pragmatic, he is at the point of sorting clothes into boxes.
I ask what she brought to his life. Where to start?
‘Company, affection, love, fondness, humour, a lively social life. Lots of parties, dinners, friends. Laughter. Loyalty.
‘We were unswervingly loyal to each other. I was always faithful. I don’t see the point of getting married if you aren’t going to be. Don’t say the bloody vows if you don’t intend to keep them.’
They were both divorced when they ‘hooked up’, as he puts it. He had two sons from his first marriage to Carrie (touchingly, he still visits her too. ‘She is also in a care home’). Sandy had moved to London after tiring of Hollywood life when she wrote to him, suggesting they meet. ‘I think she was writing a book or something. It’s unusual isn’t it, being approached by the woman? I was intrigued.
‘As it happened I was going to be in town that night and invited her for dinner. We dined again, and again, and about a week later she moved in. We married four years later.’
He had three hugely successful thrillers under his belt by
this time, and was off-the-scale rich. But soon after they married he not only lost his entire fortune, but ended up a million pounds in debt because his trusted financial adviser turned out to be not as trustworthy as he had believed.
‘My financial affairs were a bit of a rollercoaster. Lost the lot, and more because he’d convinced me to take a mortgage on the house.
‘I was in a pickle, but Sandy took it in her stride. She was convinced I could just do it again. She might have been more convinced than I was.’
She shooed him up to the attic of their then home, and he attacked that keyboard. In no time at all, he was a multi-millionaire again.
‘I’ve had a lot of luck in my life,’ he says. ‘Right book at the right time, right publisher, turning my head just at the right time to avoid the bullet – like Trump.’
Obviously, we could get very distracted here by the (more well documented) part of Freddie’s life that involved working as a spy for M16. If his thrillers have an air of authenticity it’s because many aspects were based on truth.
What’s glorious about an audience with him is that a lot of his anecdotes include lines like ‘. . . and then I was picked up in East Germany by the Stasi, but I just pretended to be a blithering idiot and they showed me to a door which could have been to the execution chamber but was actually to the car park’.
Before his marriages there were lots of romantic encounters that are pure James Bond, too. He once had to make a sharp exit from Germany after discovering that the woman he was sleeping with was also the mistress of the German defence minister, ‘who was not renowned for his sense of humour’.
Now looking back on those days with a certain bemusement, he says: ‘Oh yes. I had a very lively bachelordom, from about 15 to 35.’
Is it true he was never paid for his spy work? ‘Absolutely. I never wanted to be. I was doing it for my country.’
He tells me that one of the characters in his new book will be based on a KGB man he once encountered – and evaded. His name? Vladimir Putin.
Interestingly, given that Freddie has made an entire career of a skilful merging of fact and fiction, he has been struck by an unexpected aspect of the new Jackal series.
‘What I find interesting is that the assassin in this one is a happily married family man.’ His laugh suggests that this is preposterous, and wouldn’t have happened on his watch.
‘He’s a cold killer. Can you imagine his wife saying “Did you have a nice day?” and him saying “Oh yes, just shot a few people”.’
His home life with Sandy sounds idyllic. They were well matched. ‘She never wanted children – she wasn’t a maternal woman – and nor did I because I already had two sons.
‘She did have her dogs, though. There were three or four of them whose ashes we scattered in the garden. She loved them; they were her babies. So when I scatter hers, she will be with them’.
His account of Sandy’s opioid addiction is matter-of-fact, almost stark.
‘It started about four years ago. She had these pains – muscular, joint, arthritis – but there was nothing there. People with hypochondria imagine they are ill, but eventually become ill because of the medication.
‘She was prescribed morphine-based painkillers.’
By a doctor? ‘Yes, I’m afraid it was, but she did end up self-treating too, and too much.
‘There is a huge scandal in America with an opioid called OxyContin. There have been thousands and thousands of deaths and the pharmaceutical companies have made a fortune – but it has cost a lot of lives.
‘Sandy favoured a painkiller like OxyContin, but one which was available here.’
Where did she get it, after the official routes were exhausted? ‘I don’t know, but she self-medicated until it broke her health.’
As Sandy’s health crumbled, he tried to save her. She tried to save herself too, he says.
‘She knew she was addicted. She went through a programme to wean herself off it, and it was successful, but by then it was too late. ‘
He talks of the ‘health system collapsing’, as Sandy was rushed to hospital (once on a stretcher), then discharged, then readmitted. In short, he had a few years of hell.
‘It’s so hard to explain. The hospital says, “Please remove her, this is not a care home. There is nothing more we can do”, then it’s home, hospital, care home.
‘But by the end she was resigned. And so was I.’
We are talking about this as MPs prepare to vote on the Assisted Dying Bill. Has watching Sandy die influenced his views there?
‘Yes, I’m in favour of it,’ he says. ‘Where there is unspeakable pain and death is unavoidable, and where the person can administer the drug themselves …’
They were not in that situation because Sandy was not in pain towards the end, but he suggests she would have liked to have had more options because with the law as it stands ‘helping her on her way would have been murder’.
There have been other lessons learned from the final weeks and months with her, too. ‘What watching Sandy go has taught me is that I’m not afraid to die. If the doctor says, “There is a shadow on your lung, blah, blah, you have a year”, I won’t say Oh GOD”. I will say “Ok, a year to go”.’
He seems in fine fettle, though, both physically and mentally.
‘The old corpus is still in good working order,’ he confirms. ‘Everything is functioning – heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, brain.
‘I’m just a bit unsteady on my legs now. I used to stride along, then I strolled. Now I shuffle. I don’t even have a walking stick, although that might have to change.’
Will he be lonely? Both his sons – and his four grandchildren – live abroad, which isn’t ideal, but ‘we talk on Zoom’.
There is a wonderful housekeeper and her gardener husband who will ‘keep me fed’.
His fingers seem itching to get to that keyboard, which is possibly his best defence against loneliness.
He tells me that ‘probably this winter’ he will lock himself away, ‘close the curtains, put a note on the door saying LEAVE ME ALONE, and put the light on over the typewriter, then get going’.
It will be another ‘thumping’ book, for sure.
Will he ever write about Sandy, or about love, though, because he very much could?
‘No,’ he says, gently. ‘That part is now sealed.’
This post was originally published on here
