Frederick Forsyth, the internationally acclaimed British author whose talent for page-turning thrillers provided the fodder for such films as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and The Fourth Protocol, died Monday. He was 86.

Forsyth died at his home in Buckinghamshire, England, his literary agency Curtis Brown announced.

The journalist turned novelist, who saw his share of derring-do as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, was one of the most influential authors of his genre. He excited his fans for four decades, weaving topical subject matter and political machinations with edge-of-your-seat action.

To do so, he used only a typewriter. No computers for him.

“I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again,” he told the BBC in 2008. “And have you ever tried to hack into my typewriter? It is very secure.”

Forsyth hit it big right out of the gate in 1971 with The Day of the Jackal, a chilling political drama about a relentless English assassin, known only as The Jackal, hired by the OAS to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle in 1963.

In need of quick money, Forsyth drew inspiration from his first assignment as a journalist for Reuters.

“Jackal was all prepared in my head, as I had lived through being a foreign correspondent in Paris in 1962-63,” Forsyth told Publishers Weekly in 2018. “The OAS was on the threshold of assassinating the president of France. Even at the time, I didn’t think they would succeed unless they hired a real pro with a sniper rifle. Seven years later, I went back to that thought. I didn’t do any preparation and wrote off the top of my head, producing 10 pages per day over 35 days, which became a novel. The only thing I researched was how to forge a British passport.”

An immediate success, The Day of the Jackal spent seven weeks at No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller List throughout October and November in 1971. The following year, he received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

In 1973, a Universal Pictures’ adaptation, directed by Fred Zinnemann from a screenplay by Kenneth Ross, hit the big screen, with Edward Fox as the enigmatic title character. It grossed more than $16 million at the domestic box office as one of the top-grossing films of the year. (Remakes in 1997 and last year featured Bruce Willis and Eddie Redmayne as the assassin, respectively.)

Forsyth’s follow-up, 1972’s The Odessa File, topped the Times list in 1973 for five weeks. Also set in 1963, it follows German reporter Peter Miller as he hunts for concentration camp commander Eduard Roschmann (a real SS commander Forsyth fictionalized in the book). In the process, Miller uncovers and infiltrates a secret organization — code-named Odessa — made up of former SS members.

“People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws, they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything,” reads one passage from the book. “So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.”

Deftly blending elements of intrigue and suspense with an acute attention to historical detail, The Odessa File shed light on Nazi war criminals who had eluded justice. Several years after the book’s release, Roschmann, whose Holocaust atrocities had earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Riga,” was apprehended in Argentina, where he had been in exile for decades.

The Odessa File was adapted at Columbia Pictures in 1974, with Jon Voight as Miller and Maximilian Schell as Roschmann.

His 1974 novel The Dogs of War, about a band of mercenaries tasked with killing the president of an African country, became a 1980 film directed by John Irvin and starring Christopher Walken.

The Fourth Protocol, first published in 1984 and another Times top seller, was turned into a 1987 movie starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan; it’s about a Cold War plot by Soviet Union outliers to plant a nuclear bomb near an American airbase.

In 2016, Forsyth announced he was retiring from the world of fiction, saying his wife would no longer allow him to travel to adventurous places, but he returned to the world of intrigue with the cyber spy novel The Fox in 2018.

All along, he kept his hand in the newspaper world, writing a column for the U.K.’s Daily Express well into his 80s.

“I consider myself a journalistic writer, keeping to the facts and making sure they are accurate,” Forsyth said in a 2015 interview with Crimespree Magazine. “I do not write much emotional stuff or fancy language. My books were all contemporary current affairs based on what I had seen. Hell, I made mistakes and have done so many things, I chose to write about them, or maybe not.”

Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was born on Aug. 25, 1938, in Ashford, Kent, England. His parents, Frederick and Phyllis, were shopkeepers.

As he explained in 2010, Forsyth initially had little interest in his chosen craft. “When I was a kid, I had only one overweening ambition,” he said. “And it derived from the fact that when I was a 2-year-old, I remember staring up at what seemed like silver fish whirling and twirling in the sky, leaving contrails of white vapor. I was watching the Battle of Britain, and in my tiny little baby way, I wanted to be a pilot.”

After attending the Tonbridge School in Kent and the University of Granada in Spain, Forsyth got his wish. At 19, he joined the Royal Air Force, where he piloted the de Havilland Vampire fighter jet.

With aviator checked off his to-do list, Forsyth set out to see the world. As a foreign correspondent for Reuters and then the BBC, he traveled to such locales as France, East Germany and Nigeria.

His time in Nigeria led to his first book. Published in 1969, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend was an account of the 1967-70 Nigerian Civil War.

His other books included 1979’s The Devil’s Alternative, 1989’s The Negotiator, 1994’s The Fist of God, 1996’s Icon, 2003’s Avenger and 2010’s The Cobra. (Icon and Avenger became TV movies starring Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott, respectively.)

Forsyth also dabbled in television, most notably as the writer and presenter of the 1989 London Weekend Television series Frederick Forsyth Presents.

In 2010, he dipped his toe into theater, contributing to the book for Love Never Dies, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera featuring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was loosely based on his 1999 novel, The Phantom of Manhattan.

In 1997, he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire to commemorate his contribution to literature. His memoir, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, was published in 2015.

Survivors include his sons, Stuart and Shane, from his 1973-88 marriage to model Carol Cunningham. His second wife, Sandy, whom he wed in 1994, died in October.

“A journalist should never join the establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it,” Forsyth said during his Crimespree interview. “In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting, but never joining. In short, an outsider.”