A sequel after 50 long years is a miracle. In 1972, Frederick Forsyth published ‘The Odessa Files’. It was a bestseller. At 86, Forsyth’s sequel was to be finally out this September. But the investigative reporter and espionage thriller writer vanished last week, like his iconic character, the Jackal, calling it a day — just before the proof copies of the ‘Revenge of Odessa’ arrived at his doorstep.

Like the Beatles, Freddie and his gang were part of an all boys’ club — in many ways thriller writing still is — of British men born between the two World Wars. David John Moore Cornwell, better known as John Le Carre, a former spy, was the oldest of this gang. He died in 2020 at 89. In a publishing world that had known and welcomed the glitzy playboy Bond, Le Carre chose to introduce George Smiley — short, overweight, bespectacled, bored.

There is Jeffrey Archer, a storyteller, lover of cricket and former politician who also went to prison. Archer is no Le Carre and certainly not in Forsyth’s geopolitical thriller mould, but a man who can match the Forsyth book figures. At 85, he is still going strong. He, too, has a new book out this year.

Then we have Ken Follet, dabbler in historical page-turners. He shot into fame, however, for his spy thriller, ‘Eye of the Needle’. At 75, Follet is still young and writing books thicker than ever. He has written 37 books, has sold 188 million copies and is showing no signs of slowing down. The last men standing, Archer and Follet, still have many stories to tell — and sell. They are, like those who have passed, legends who keep readers hooked to a steady dose of adrenaline — like a bag of chips keeping you going for just another one. And they are the first of their generation to make writing lucrative.

Forsyth’s books — dog-eared and found in libraries across the country — were the first exposure to geopolitics for a generation that did not have access to the Internet. His precise spy thrillers — many were based on his own experiences — were a rite of passage. His books sold quickly just by the strength of the story.

A journalist with Reuters, he was posted in Germany when it was still divided. Under strict surveillance, he learnt to live with it lightly. Once in Spain, he insisted on staying with a family who spoke no English. He could speak French and German and turned down a job in the foreign office to be a pilot. He got into fights, hitch-hiked and survived an attack by a MiG in the Nigerian civil war.

Talking of thrillers, there’s David Baldacci, of course, who has been belting them out annually since ‘Absolute Power’ in 1996. Without fail, each summer, like the sun, comes a Baldacci just in time for the vacation.

The only way to stay relevant is to write each year. But Forsyth did not manage the same frequency. His last book was ‘The Fox’in 2018. His first, however, was the one that “broke the mould” as Lee Child, another thriller writer who grew up reading Forsyth, described ‘The Day of The Jackal’. It was what saved him. Forsyth was broke. He was “dossing” on his friend’s sofa. He had no job, no prospects of ever getting one. “The situation was so miserable that I decided to do something that even then was seen as crazy by all I knew,” he wrote in his wildly entertaining autobiography, ‘The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue’.

“I thought I might get myself out of this mess by writing a novel. As a recourse, it was lunatic.”

So, on January 2, 1970, he sat at the kitchen table with his trusty typewriter, the one with a bullet scar across the tin cover, and wrote ‘The Day of the Jackal’. A book that had never been done before with an anonymous hero, a real politician, Charles de Gaulle, an assassination attempt and a fictional manhunt.

“In other words, it was all madness,” he wrote. It took him 35 days straight.

But as Charles de Gaulle was still alive, publishers who read the first chapter were uninterested. The spoiler alert was too much and they felt no one would ever read it. Rejected by four, he found a publisher in August. Finally, not a word was changed. And his life changed. He had a three-book deal and became “rich”.

There were 33 reprints of the ‘Day of the Jackal’ in 18 years. (Forsyth did deviate from his formula once — when he wrote a book from his heart: ‘The Phantom of Manhattan’).

By 1973, he had bought a house in Spain that he was sheepish about. This was before film deals. With the latest instalment hitting JioHotsar starring Eddie Redmayne, it was clear that Forsyth was one of the writers who did not need to worry about money.

There is something compelling about writing being the only escape route. Archer wrote ‘Not a Penny More Not a Penny Less’ from his own experience of almost being bankrupt — it was his only way out. Le Carre might not have had a financial hole he needed to crawl out of, but when he wrote ‘The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold’, he was under “unshared” personal stress. He wrote to live.

But perhaps what is most interesting is that Archer, Forsyth and Follet wrote their bestsellers in trot. Forsyth pounded out ‘The Jackal’ in over a month. Archer wrote his first hit in three months. There were numerous drafts. Follet’s ‘Eye for the Needle’ was finished in three weeks. He was 27. Like Archer, Le Carre and Forsyth, it was the book that changed his life. He was working in a publishing firm, earning 8,000 pounds a year and the book was auctioned for $8 lakh.

The secret to success — a strict regimen of writing. Archer writes two hours each day till 6 am and then till the evening. No one sees the novel till the 12th or 13th draft. The only writer’s block he has ever known is his house in Majorca where he begins every book. Forsyth had iron discipline that he inherited from being a journalist — 10 pages a day from 8 am to noon.  “In children, daydreaming is a rebuke; in a writer, it is indispensable,” he wrote.