Meet The Man The Late Frederick Forsyth Chose To Pen The Sequel To His Best-Known Work

Tony Kent tries to write stuff that’s going to make you stay on the beach and get sunburned. Or stay in a bath and the bath goes cold. Call it one’s own presumptions about writing but it’s certainly a little difficult to reconcile that level of literary investment with someone who started out very young in the boxing ring.

“I boxed for a very, very long time from a very early age. I had my first fight when I was 12 and my last when I was 23—and did quite well in that time. I won various national championships and boxed for England, Scottish and British universities. I ran all the university boxing for a while,” recalls the buff Kent, a criminal barrister who’s written books like Killer Intent, No Way to Die, The Shadow Network, .

But stranger still, how does one go from throwing hooks to penning books—to filling in for Frederick Forsyth? Known for combining intricate plots with deep, real-world research, often involving dangerous firsthand experiences thanks to working as a RAF pilot, an MI6 operative and later a journalist for Reuters and the BBC—Forsyth, who died in June last year, sold over 70 million books. And now, Kent’s written the official sequel—Revenge of Odessa—to Forsyth’s most popular and career-defining works—The Odessa File.

“I got to know Freddie about four years ago,” Kent recalls an afternoon of speaking events where he was invited to speak in lieu or addition to Forsyth—should the frail octogenarian ultimately not be up to the task. But as the day went on, they got on really well.

“I discovered halfway through the night that he thought that I was from the local bookshop. And that I was there to help him with his signing. And eventually he obviously discovered that wasn’t the case—and he became much more interested in me.”

Kent didn’t have to make the speech in the end. “Freddie got up and made an incredible speech that knocked the socks off anything I would have done. Genuinely, despite the fact that I speak for a living.”

The story of how Kent came to write the sequel to The Odessa File began with Chiltern Kills, the one-day crime writing festival he founded, where the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Ian Rankin have come down. “And we got Freddie to come along to the first one of those, after which he became our patron for the next few years. And I got to know him through that. I didn’t see a huge amount of him—he just knew who I was, I guess.”

It turned out that Frederick Forsyth had been reading Kent’s books. Having long been interested in a sequel to his iconic second novel—where the protagonist doesn’t fortunately die—for a long time, as well in the rise of the far right across Europe.

“He wasn’t a big believer, as some people are, that there was a far-right problem in Britain. I think that we have a tendency in Britain to take anybody who’s not very left leaning and immediately start calling them extreme. It’s unfair. However, it is correct to say, that in Eastern Europe and Central Europe, there is a problem with the far right. When you look at the alternative for Deutschland, which we reference quite a lot in Odessa, they’re now giving public statements saying the SS weren’t all wrong and the Holocaust wasn’t that bad a thing. That’s what he was concerned about.”

In the 1972 book, a German reporter on a mission against sadistic Nazi war criminals infiltrates a secret organisation of former SS officers. Forsyth had written a four-page outline to where he thought the Revenge of Odessa would go. Having known Kent’s credentials, he suggested to Transworld that the sequel be given to him and that they write it together. “It was completely unknown to me. I had a phone call from the editor one day, and he said, ‘How would you like to co-write the sequel to one of the greatest books ever, with the greatest writer that ever lived?”

It had to be an immediate yes for Kent. In fact, he thought he was entering a “beauty parade”, that he’d have to compete with other writers for this. But it was only ever him. Kent took the four-pager and turned it into a 50-pager, almost a small novella going from beginning to end of what would happen in the book.

“It was very much inspired by what Freddie had come up with. There was a lot of back and forth. There were ultimately about five versions of this 50-page document. And that was really Freddie’s involvement—he’d come up with the core idea. And then we had a process whereby it went back to him, back to me, then to him, and so on, but always via his team.”

Over three months, Kent, Forsyth and his team hammered out the core document that would dictate the book. Kent’s work began once this document was settled. But, as they are wont to, during the writing of the book, things changed.

“It became its own thing, and then we got to the edit, which I don’t believe they had much to do with. But I do know that he read the final book—and that he very much enjoyed it. I know that because of the negotiations that began afterwards. Once he approved it, we had some negotiations about other books. And because of that, he wouldn’t have made the offers that he made were he not happy with what I had written.”

Forsyth’s writing is known for its brisk prose and matter-of-fact dialogue. Writing a sequel to a book that has continued to shape the genre—a fair amount of struggle with absorbing unmistakable characteristics of a writer readers are very familiar with, is par for the course. How did Kent adapt to all of that?

“I didn’t. Our styles aren’t a million miles apart. We both write fast.”

But that doesn’t mean writing like Forsyth came naturally to Kent—“The one thing that I’ve said to everybody who’s tried to read the book is, it’s written differently” —in fact, Kent says he is more interested in character than Forsyth. “His explanation is, ‘I don’t understand them’. And I’m not claiming that I do understand them.”

“But I like to write with them. Freddie once told me that too much character gets in the way of plot. He felt that he liked to know what characters can do, he’s not really bothered about why they’re doing it. He likes to know what they can do and to describe to a reader what they can do—I’m quite interested in why they do it as well. I kept that slightly out—that was where I tried to be more Freddie than me.”

Kent re-read everything, he says, pointing towards the “Freddie shelf” in his study. “Of all the books that I read last year trying to get his style. I’ve begun to describe it to people now as singing Frank Sinatra. When you listen to Sinatra, you always think, ‘I could sing that—the guy is not even singing. It’s easy’. And when you try to sing like him, you realise it’s actually the opposite of effortless.”

Writing a bestseller, as opposed to, say, the more hallowed task of composing a canonical work of art, is more beset with challenges with time. A crime bestseller certainly needs to do a lot—tie up loose ends, answer questions, execute plotting that doesn’t fizzle out by the end. To that stiff challenge is now added the tricky job of ensuring readability even as attention spans chip out forevermore. To what extent does Kent feel AI—the elephant in the sanctum sanctorum of art and creativity—can take over the more rigour-demanding aspects of producing a good book?

“AI is inevitable. What I would say is that there will always be a premium on human writing. People might end up paying more to read a book written by a human, in the same way that you want to listen to music by a band than by AI because you know the band put blood, sweat, tears in it. That makes it different. In the same way that you have vinyl records now, you’ll have premium human-written books. And it wouldn’t matter they’re better, but that they’re human written.”

Tony Kent Recommends

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth: Single best-written book I’ve come across. They didn’t change a word of it. I don’t believe anyone can write something so perfect so quickly unless it happened.

The Winner by David Baldacci: It’s the book that made me want to be a writer.  I read it when I was 17 years old. It was like reading a film. And I like to think that’s how I write.

No Mercy by Neil Lancaster (as Max Connor): Neil’s an ex-cop, so what’s great about his books is that everything is steeped in realism. Also, where you see some ex-cops will write books that get a bit too technical, he makes you see how it works only as much as he needs to.

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee: The Sam Wyndham books by Abir are very, very good. He’s just written this more contemporary one—and it’s just won Crime Thriller of the Year by the British Book Awards.

Catch-22: I go back to it all the time. It never fails to make me laugh out loud. It’s just layers upon layers upon layers of meaning.