Reading Frederick Forsyth, whose thrillers that we grew up with predicted the future uncannily

It was 1977, it was still Calcutta when one evening my father came from a trip to Delhi with a book in his briefcase. A book which had a man wearing a strange hat (which I later came to know to be a kepi) with the crosshairs drawn around his head. The Day of the Jackal kept me up till 1 in the morning, the final three chapters read in the bathroom so that the lights would not disturb my sisters, and I spent the next few days in a daze, still marvelling at the details.

That copy of The Day of the Jackal circulated through at least five households in the multistoreyed complex in which I stayed, and my father soon gave in to my entreaties and picked up The Odessa File as well. And so Frederick Forsyth became the completely convincing conduit to a thrilling world of spies and assassins, of Pentagon conferences and SR 71 spy planes, each detail authentic, each action believable.

The Forsyth saga

It’s not easy to understand his appeal in a world where the internet can now tell you exactly what happened with the OAS in France in exhaustive detail, or what the insides of a Blackbird spy plane look like, but in those days...

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