The Fist of God is probably one of my favourites.
(I mean, his early books, I really can't recommend his sequel to, erm, The Phantom of the Opera)
I'm not sure earlier books like that would pass these days without considerable liberal angst; that one for instance celebrates a certain lost kind of man of action with a brute uncompromising view of the mercenary perspective of the world.
For lovers of intelligent action novels though like me, he's one of those writers I always considered a sure bet when taking a punt with an Audible credit. RIP.
Fun fact, he started out as a war journalist and got fired for playing favorites and slanting his coverage towards one side. IIRC, he only started writing as a fallback after that.
Day of The Jackal is a novel I can read again and again across the years without ever getting finally bored of it. Dogs of War is almost as good and The Avenger is wonderful from start to finish, to name just a few praiseworthy examples.
Another exciting cold war thriller is the Devil's Alternative.
Writing these characters without creating Mary or Marty Sues is really damn hard.
The Guardian has a short piece from 2014 that describes the plot. Great setup and a particular sort of cultural and linguistic skillset :
"Porter, however, is descended from Canadian Inuits, who remain – physically, ethnically and culturally – virtually identical to their Siberian counterparts, despite the decades-long political rift between the two."
From : https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/03/book...
I genuinely hope someone thought to play this when he expired.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGd6CdtOqEE
[1] It took a lot of convincing by my older brother that there book was, indeed, fiction. TBH, even now, I'm pretty certain it was all plausible.
toomuchtodo•4h ago
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0287046/
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.frederickforsyth.co...