Frederick forsyth autobiography waterstones booksellers life

He was awarded a scholarship to the local public school at Tonbridge, before going on to university. Freddie began his career in the Royal Air Force in , becoming at the time the youngest man in England to earn his wings. Part of his early career was spent covering French affairs including the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle which would later provide the inspiration for The Day of the Jackal.

As an international journalist in East Germany in the s, Freddie lived and worked through the extraordinary Cold War period, including the death of JFK. He found himself under constant police and Stasi surveillance, ultimately escaping back to London to diffuse a potentially explosive situation involving the East German defence minister.

Freddie applied his knowledge of the world, and his forensic journalistic research techniques, to his work as a thriller writer.

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Freddie secured the testimony of a Riga ghetto survivor recounting the real and appalling crimes of Roschmann at Riga during the Holocaust. In pursuing the story of the escape from justice of Nazi fugitives following the war, Freddie personally infiltrated clandestine groups which supported the coming of a Fourth Reich. Perhaps most extraordinary of all was when the novel, published to great acclaim and made into a film starring John Voight, resulted in the real Eduard Roschmann being finally identified and apprehended in Argentina in In addition to his ongoing work as an author, Freddie also continued to work as a journalist, maintaining a regular column for The Daily Express until October Freddie has been married since to Sandy Molloy and lives in Buckinghamshire, England.