Outsider: my life in intrigue. Frederick Forsyth. 2015.

For more than forty years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels, from the groundbreaking Day of the Jackal to the prescient Kill List. Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers or the intricacies of worldwide drug cartels, every plot has been chillingly plausible because every detail has been minutely researched. 

But what most people don’t know is that some of Forsyth’s greatest stories of intrigue have been in his own life.

He was the RAF’s youngest pilot at the age of nineteen, barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, was strayed by a MIG during the Nigerian Civil War, smuggled a package for the Firm from East to West Germany in the middle of the night (he still doesn’t know what was in it), landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau, and was accused of helping to fund a coup in Equatorial Guinea. The Stasi arrested him, the Israelis told him secrets, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent - well, her actions were a bit more intimate.

And that’s just for starters.