Why not begin with one of his short story collections, like 'No Comebacks'? It's a great sampler of his range without committing to a full novel's worth of intricate setup. The stories are tight, clever, and often have fantastic twist endings. You get a feel for his prose, his cynical worldview, and his knack for plotting in a condensed form. If a particular story really grabs you—maybe 'There Are No Snakes in Ireland'—you'll know you're ready for the deeper dive of his novels. It's a low-pressure entry point that a lot of people overlook when recommending Forsyth.
I feel like his characters are often ciphers—vehicles for the plot. And that’s okay! The real protagonist is the Plan. So when choosing an order, you’re not choosing which character to follow, you’re choosing which intricate scheme you want to see unfold. Do you want to follow an assassination plan? A Nazi hunt? A coup? A nuclear smuggling operation? Pick the scheme that fascinates you. The pleasure is in the clinical observation of its execution, not in emotional attachment to the people doing it.
Sometimes the political intrigue in Forsyth is in what's not said—the alliances of convenience, the silent understandings between enemies. In 'The Fourth Protocol,' there's a moment where both Western and Soviet intelligence have a shared interest in containing a disaster, despite being adversaries. That grey area of mutual, unacknowledged interest is where some of the most fascinating politics happen. It's not black-and-white ideology; it's the pragmatic management of a system. His characters often operate in these shadows, where the official policy is one thing, and the on-the-ground necessity is another. Navigating that gap is where the real professional and political survival lies.
Has anyone brought up the prose style itself? 'The Day of the Jackal' is written with a certain elegant, economical coldness. Sentences are clean, precise, unadorned. By 'The Afghan,' the prose feels more hurried, fragmented, maybe reflecting the pace of modern life. The early prose style itself is a character. If you love that specific, calm, authoritative narrative voice, then the first three books are your holy text. Later books feel like they're in a different, if related, dialect.