As his latest hit thriller hits the shelves, top author Frederick Forsyth tells some hair-raising stories of his own.

Top author Frederick Forsyth has had more brushes with danger during his career than most of us have had hot dinners.

He’s been arrested and interrogated by police in East Germany, tailed and bugged by the KGB in Moscow and shot at by Nigerians in Biafra. But it’s all in a day’s work for the man who brought us The Day Of The Jackal, The Odessa File and other stories about assassins, mercenaries, terrorists and kidnappers.

The 71-year-old author says he had another close shave last year, while researching his latest book, The Cobra.

His trip to Guinea-Bissau, West Africa – or that “war-ravaged, gutted hell-hole” as Forsyth describes it – was rather eventful.

“While I was airborne someone blew the chief of the Army to pieces with a bomb under his desk. As I landed at 2am, the vengeful army was heading into town to seek retribution.”

Later that night, Forsyth was woken in his hotel room by the sound of a bomb exploding 500 yards away. It seemed that the earlier murder has sparked a revenge killing, and President Joao Bernardo Vieira had been shot at his presidential villa and then hacked to death with machetes.

The former Reuters foreign correspondent recalls: “Borders and airports were immediately closed so I had a world exclusive. Great fun at 71! Quite like old times.” Hours later he was recounting the events on the BBC before returning to his research.

Forsyth was visiting the former Portuguese colony, a key transit point for cocaine being smuggled to Europe, to research his latest thriller, The Cobra, which sees a former CIA operative given a free rein to do whatever it takes to fight the cocaine cartels and win the war on drugs.

He says he doesn’t get anxious when travelling to volatile countries for research, but he does take care.

“I’m not exactly scared, but a bit wary. The trick is to have a feasible cover story and to keep beaming, shaking hands and standing rounds of beer. Stoned African soldiers are the worst – completely unpredictable.”

Despite his frightening encounters with soldiers and corrupt police, he says the worst danger he faces when visiting far-flung places is tropical diseases.

“In Bissau last year I picked up a blood infection that nearly cost me my left leg. I arrived back at Harley Street just in time.”

And he says that despite the thrills and spills, he knows how to relax in such exotic locations: James Bond-style leisure activities such as scuba diving and big game fishing are among his passions.

Born in 1938, the only child of shopkeeper parents in Ashford, Kent, his family were the epitome of the English middle classes, he said. But the young man always had a desire to travel.

“As a boy I had two burning passions – to fly for the RAF and travel all over the world. National Service achieved the first (he won his wings at the age of 19) and time as a foreign correspondent and later a novelist accomplished the second.”

After a period at the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, he was hired by Reuters and was posted to Paris where he witnessed street rioting by opponents of General de Gaulle’s independence plans for Algeria.

It gave him the idea for The Day Of The Jackal, which was published in 1971 and later adapted twice into films. He has never looked back.

Although he might enjoy James Bond-style leisure pursuits, when it comes to writing, Forsyth goes for realism. His meticulous research and eye for detail means that every novel is a bestseller.

But he has no thoughts of retiring, even though he has plenty to keep him occupied outside of writing.

“Each time a novel comes out I say, ‘That’s it. I have chickens to feed, dogs to walk, fish to catch, I’m outta here’. Then I see something and the old reporter wakes up and I have to check it out to see if it is really true.”

After the phenomenal success of his writing career, does he have any further ambitions?

“I’ve done most things I wanted to do,” he reflects, “except I never caught that 1,000lb marlin, the legendary ‘grinder’. My biggest was 660lbs, off Mexico.

“And I do wish my two sons would stop mucking about and make me a grandchild or two. But that’s it. A small child and a big fish.”

* The Cobra, by Frederick Forsyth, was published by Bantam on August 19, priced £18.99.