Frederick Forsyth, Master of the Geopolitical Thriller, Dies at 86

Frederick Forsyth, who used his early experience as a British foreign correspondent as fodder for a series of swashbuckling, best-selling thrillers in the 1970s, including “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File” and “The Dogs of War,” died on Monday at his home in Jordans, a village north of London. He was 86.

His literary representative, Jonathan Lloyd, did not specify a cause, saying only that the death followed a short illness.

Mr. Forsyth was a master of the geopolitical nail-biter, writing novels embedded in an international demimonde populated by spies, mercenaries and political extremists. He wrote 24 books, including 14 novels, and sold more than 75 million copies.

Though he set many of his best works during the Cold War of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Forsyth often chose stories and characters operating apart from the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, in post-colonial conflicts in Africa, for example, or involving Nazi hunters in Europe. His novel “The Fourth Protocol” (1984), which many critics considered his best, offered a twisting tale of nuclear espionage and radical-left politics in Britain.

His books regularly topped the best-seller lists, and many were turned into movies within a few years of their debut. A film version of “The Day of the Jackal,” starring Michael Lonsdale, appeared in 1973, just two years after the novel’s publication; a second movie version, with Bruce Willis and Sidney Poitier, was released in 1997 as “The Jackal.” (A television series based on the novel, starring Eddie Redmayne, aired last year.)

Mr. Forsyth came by his subjects through firsthand experience. Eschewing college after high school, he joined the Royal Air Force, where he flew fighter jets.

He then worked as a reporter for Reuters; at one point, he covered the attempted assassination of President Charles de Gaulle of France by far-right militants angry over the country’s withdrawal from Algeria. It was an event that he fictionalized to great effect in “The Day of the Jackal,” which followed, in minute detail, the preparations of an elusive assassin and the French government’s efforts to stop him.

In 1965, Mr. Forsyth moved to the BBC, where he covered a civil war in Nigeria between the central, dictatorial government and the breakaway state of Biafra. In 2015, he revealed that while in Africa he also worked as an informant for British intelligence.

His reporting on Biafra led to two books, the nonfiction “The Biafran Story” (1969) and “The Dogs of War” (1974), about a group of mercenaries hired by a shady international consortium to stage a coup against a resources-rich African country.

Mr. Forsyth was politically conservative, and supported the Brexit campaign to leave the European Union in 2016.

This is a developing story. A complete obituary will follow.

Sopan Deb contributed reporting.