The Odessa File

"Frederick Forsyth is the BMW of thriller writers. I always think if you wanted to learn how to make a car you’d get a BMW and take it apart and put it back together again as many times as you needed to work out how they do it. That’s what I think about Forsyth’s thriller writing. This one has a great setting in the early 1970s when there were still Nazis everywhere and gold and conspiracy theories. For the time it was very surprising to have a German hero, and a sympathetic one. This book sets the template for the lightening paced thrillers with conspiracies and action, cutting from place to place – now we’re here, now we’re there – information, a kind of gung-ho attitude … It really is the business, that book. Well, he perfected the technique of documentary realism, which is much harder than it might look. He puts in lots of contemporary information and realism and gets the balance exactly right. Tom Clancy, for example, puts in much too much detail, but Forsyth builds in the contemporary conspiracy with good editing. Basically, he’s a brilliant editor. Each scene is exactly the right length, hopping from place to place. Technically he’s very accomplished."

"Now, Odessa File is Freddie’s second book (I always call him Freddie), and after the enormous success of Day of the Jackal he was thinking of doing something about mercenaries in Africa. His publishers said: ‘Do Nazis first and mercenaries later.’ That’s publishing pretty much to a T. Freddie had been Reuters correspondent in Germany and was aware that there was a significant number of former Nazis ending up in government and Simon Wiesenthal told him about Odessa. So he ended up with two men in mind – his real villain, Edward Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga, and the hero of his book, Peter Miller, who hunts Roschmann for reasons that become apparent at the end – there might be people who haven’t read this book. I read it as a teenager and loved it. Ah, well, the problem with Odessa, which stands for Organisation of Former SS Associates, you can look the German up, is that if you’d been in the SS and were trying not to get hunted you’re not going to call your organisation that, are you? So, basically, it’s bollocks. I’ve spoken to Freddie and he all but admitted it, but because of his book the myth persists. A man called Willhelm Hoettl fed the story to Simon Wiesenthal [the famous Nazi hunter] who fed it to Anthony Terry at the Sunday Times where Freddie picked it up and all these people put their spin on it. It is probably true that there were various groups of former SS people and perhaps even one called Odessa in Southern Germany, but the ball has been tampered with so many times and it now lodges deep in the imagination of anyone trying to think about Nazis in the post-war period. But it is a great book with a lot of accuracy and it’s a perfect depiction of post-war Germany."