Interviews
Q&A with Frederick Forsyth
Barnes & Noble.com: Before venturing into electronic publishing, you worked in a great variety of narrative forms: full-length novels, short stories (No Comebacks), novellas (The Shepherd), even book length non-fiction (The Biafra Story). Do you have a preference for any of these forms, or are you equally at home in all of them?
Frederick Forsyth: Basically I hope I am at home in all these media. Essentially I am a teller of stories. Each story has a natural telling length - not too sparse, not
too much padding. If you have a story in your mind that will simply not
sustain a full-length novel, you have to find another, shorter, format. I
believe the short story (about 30 to 100 pages of typescript) and the
novella (about 100-200 pages) to be much over-looked and disregarded art
forms. Some of the most riveting classics, by Kipling, O. Henry, Saki and
Mauham, have been in these forms. Because they are 'manageable' in a
one-exercise purchase-and-consumption form. I believe they may be revived by
the Internet.
B&N.com: You're best known, of course, as a writer of thrillers, but you've also produced the occasional change of pace, such as The Shepherd, a Christmas story, and The Phantom of Manhattan, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. How has your core audience responded to these changes in direction?
FF: Broadly speaking, yes. I have never really known who precisely buys and reads my work, but the sales figures of the non-thrillers bear up well, so I
think the occasional change of pace, style, theme and length cannot
disappoint the core audience too much, or it would show.
B&N.com: Although you've written many successful books, you're probably still best known for your debut novel, The Day of the Jackal, which has been perennially popular and enormously influential. Do you find it at all frustrating that so
many readers still associate you with this particular book?
FF: Not at all. Most writers are essentially known for one work more than any other. It may be the first, not necessarily. But certainly if people recall
that first, thirty-year-old book most of all, I am damned grateful. Better
than no one ever read a word I wrote!
B&N.com: Do you yourself think you've written better novels in the years since Jackal appeared? Do you have any particular favorites?
FF: My favourite is actually The Fist of God. It was, of all, the most factual, and the most revelatory. Written just after the Gulf War, I took a chance and gambled on revealing a host of details that I believed had been witheld from the public while the war was on. Later, most of these revelations were confirmed as true.
B&N.com: A number of your novels (Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol) have been successfully filmed. Which of these films most accurately reflected your own original intentions?
FF: No doubt, Day of the Jackal. It was directed by that master film maker, Fred Zinnemann, he of High Noon and A Man for All Seasons. I thought he did a superb job on it.
B&N.com: Now that your initial e-book venture is behind you, do you have any plans for future novels or stories, either in electronic or traditional print
format?
FF: Not yet. I am a bit of a one-thing-at-a-time man. There are a number of vague ideas in my head, but I am not ready to tell them yet. First will come
the choice of subject and format, then the research, then the writing. Give
me a moment to draw breath!