Why thriller writer Frederick Forsyth is giving up on the genre
I ran out of things to say, says British writer and former spy, now 78 (plus his wife says he’s too old to travel to adventurous places now), and declares 2015 memoir The Outsider his ‘swan song’
After a dozen novels and 70 million book sales under his belt, British writer Frederick Forsyth says he is giving up on thrillers because his wife told him he can no longer travel to adventurous places.
“I’m tired of it and I can’t just sit at home and do a nice little romance from my study,” says the 78-year-old, who revealed in a memoir last year that he had worked extensively for the MI6 spy service.
“I ran out of things to say,” says the soft-spoken Forsyth, who trained as a Royal Air Force pilot before joining Reuters news agency in 1961 and beginning his career as a novelist in the 1970s.
After his last trip to Somalia as research for The Kill List, Forsyth says his wife told him: “You’re far too old, these places are bloody dangerous and you don’t run as avidly, as nimbly as you used to.”
Forsyth, who has only ever written on a typewriter, says he had tried an online search for Somalia but had been “very dissatisfied” with the results. “There was some statistical information on Somalia but not what I wanted, which was atmosphere,” he says. His memoir The Outsider is his “swan song”, he says.