Frederick Forsyth, who died this week aged 86, was no stranger to “fast fiction”, says The Daily Telegraph. He wrote his first and most famous novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), in just 35 days when unemployed and broke. The book – about a professional assassin hired to kill Charles de Gaulle – was turned down by four publishers, before Forsyth met a director of a publishing firm at a party and forced him to read a précis. For his subsequent novels, he would spend years on research but only 33 days writing: rising at 7am, hammering out 4,000 words, going for a walk to think about it and then tweaking what he’d written. “It’s a slog,” he said. “I write intensively to get it over with. When I write the words ‘Chapter 1’ all the fun goes out of it.”

Born in 1938, Forsyth started out as a journalist, joining Reuters in 1961. One boozy evening in East Berlin, he discovered a column of Soviet tanks, rocket-launchers and troop carriers lining up on the streets and hastily filed a report predicting an “imminent attack” on West Germany. Only after US president Lyndon Johnson and British prime minister Alec Douglas-Home had been woken for an emergency conference did he realise it was a rehearsal for the annual May Day parade. Forsyth’s work as a reporter – and 20 years as an MI6 informant – helped give his novels an unmistakable “stamp of authenticity”. He was particularly proud of The Dogs of War (1974), which inspired a French mercenary to launch a coup in the Comoros Islands four years later. As the private army came up the beach, Forsyth wrote in his memoir, “they carried a paperback edition of Les Chiens de Guerre so that they could constantly find out what they were supposed to do next”.

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In the 1990s, lads’ mags were reviled by everyone from broadsheet columnists to feminist academics, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. But compared with today’s “bleak digital landscape” of AI smut and OnlyFans subscriptions, FHM and Maxim encouraging men to enjoy “cold lager, bare breasts and football gossip” looks positively healthy.

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