Books by Frederick Forsyth
Frederick Forsyth is the winner of three Edgar Awards, and in 2012 he won the Diamond Dagger Award.
“Frederick Forsyth is the BMW of thriller writers. I always think if you wanted to learn how to make a car you’d get a BMW and take it apart and put it back together again as many times as you needed to work out how they do it. That’s what I think about Forsyth’s thriller writing.” Matt Lynn recommending Great British Thrillers.
“Essentially it consists of two interlinked hunting stories. You have the jackal, the assassin, who is stalking de Gaulle. And then you have the police and the intelligence services trying to pre-empt him, stalking him. And, to make a huge generalization, for 90% of our 300,000 years as hominids on this planet, we were hunter gatherers. It is very much in our nature, which I think explains why people are so fascinated by assassination.” Read more...
The best books on Assassinations
Michael Burleigh, Historian
“This book sets the template for the lightening paced thrillers with conspiracies and action, cutting from place to place, information, a kind of gung-ho attitude.” Read more...
The Best Classic British Thrillers
Matt Lynn, Novelist
Interviews where books by Frederick Forsyth were recommended
The Best Classic British Thrillers, recommended by Matt Lynn
Author Matt Lynn says that good thrillers need a sense of foreboding and tension – and a brilliant central character. “The thriller has always been a very political genre, a kind of snapshot in time”
The best books on Nazi Hunters, recommended by Guy Walters
The Times journalist calls Simon Wiesenthal a liar. He’s just not this secular saint that everyone says he is – his memoirs all contradict each other and are at odds with the rest of the evidence
The best books on Assassinations, recommended by Michael Burleigh
From Julius Caesar to Jamal Khashoggi, assassinations often seem earth-shattering in their consequences. But, as historian Michael Burleigh explains, those consequences are rarely the ones the assassins intended. Here, he recommends the best books on assassinations and the assassins who carry them out, including the role of drones and PR agencies.
The Best Classic Thrillers, recommended by Sam Bourne
The bestselling author tells us how his other job as a political journalist helps with thriller writing, and what makes le Carré, Forsyth and Buchan such masters of their trade
The best books on Writing a Great Thriller, recommended by James Twining
Best-selling author says the elements you need to write a perfect thriller are a brilliant central character, some link to reality, and an inanimate object around which the human story revolves.
