I promised to write about two recent real-world developments. The first was the advent on October 27, 2025, of a machine-man's machine-o-pedia. (Say what you will about Wikipedia, but at least it's created by humans.) The second is a human story.
We have lost a lot of people (and animal companions, poor Lucy) in 2025. This is as it has always been. Among them were two authors. I didn't find out right away that they had died. It was only during my five-weeks-and-a-day that I learned that Martin Cruz Smith and Frederick Forsyth left us in this year 2025.
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Born on November 3, 1942, in Reading, Pennsylvania, Martin Cruz Smith was best known for his detective novels set in the Soviet Union and afterwards in Russia. The first of these was Gorky Park (1981), an exciting and engrossing book that was made into a movie in 1983. Although he was known for his detective novels, Mr. Smith got his start in other genres. His earliest credit in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is The Indians Won, an alternate history published in 1970. I have never read it, but I think we can easily add it to the Internet American Indian Science Fiction Database. Martin Cruz Smith also wrote the horror novel Nightwing (1977), which was also adapted to film, in 1979. (Links here and here.)
Martin Cruz Smith died on July 11, 2025, in San Rafael, California.
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Frederick Forsyth was born on August 25, 1938, in Ashford, Kent, England. He realized instant fame with the success of his novel The Day of the Jackal, published in 1971 and adapted to film in 1973. (I had thought of him as significantly older than Mr. Smith, but only four years separated them.) Many more international thrillers, some of them almost documentary or journalistic in nature, followed. I have read several of them with pleasure, and I have one more waiting to be read on my shelf.
I have read books in a similar vein by John le Carré (1931-2020), and I have enjoyed them, too, but reading John le Carré often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Reading Frederick Forsyth never does, even if his books are not always very novelistic. (His female agent in The Negotiator is a basically a non-entity.) The reason for that, I know, is that the former was pretty well anti-American (and on the left end of the political spectrum), whereas the latter was not. Getting more to the heart of the matter (that was Greene, not Forsyth), Frederick Forsyth seemed to be a good and decent person. I have a feeling that John le Carré was perhaps a little nasty. At least that seems to come out in his books. (John le Carré went to Ireland to exit from Brexit. Frederick Forsyth went there to visit his first wife in the nursing home.) Anyway, although Mr. Forsyth was known for writing in one genre, he also wrote in another, namely, the ghost story, though his was of an unusual type. Its title is The Shepherd. I read it earlier this year in the Bantam Books edition of 1977, illustrated by Lou Feck (1925-1981).
Frederick Forsyth died on June 9, 2025, in Jordans, Buckinghamshire, England.
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I read books by both Martin Cruz Smith and Frederick Forsyth this year. I began the year by reading Independence Square (2023) by Mr. Smith. Like I said, Gorky Park is an exciting book. I remember when it was published and how exciting it was then. Sometimes a novel is just a novel, but sometimes it can be an event. Gorky Park was an event in 1981. Independence Square, on the opposite end of Arkady Renko's career as a police detective, is, I'm sad to say, a letdown. It ends too quickly, as if its author were in a rush to finish. And maybe he was. Anyway, I'm not sure I have ever read a book set so recently in the past. That was a new experience for me.
Independence Square touches on two pet projects of the left, the coronavirus and war in Ukraine. I didn't let those things bother me, though. It bothered me far more to discover that the author's powers were fading, partly because of his age, I'm sure, but more due, I'm equally sure, to the Parkinson's disease that had beset him. I hated to think of his suffering. Like him, Arkady Renko has Parkinson's disease in Independence Square. Like him, his powers fade. And like Travis McGee and Johnny Fever, Renko finds himself to be a father.
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Hundreds of books came into my possession earlier this year after the man upstairs died, leaving them behind as we all must one day leave everything behind. Among them were The Day of the Jackal and The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth. I read both this year. This fall, I read The Negotiator (1989). That book is better when the story is more particular and closer to its characters. It's not as good when it takes the bird's-eye view. The set-up is based on the idea of "peak oil." As I was reading, it came to me that "peak oil" was the 1980s and '90s version of "overpopulation." So many people, including conservatives (who should have known better), accepted these things as real threats, the first in the 1960s and '70s, the second in later decades. Science fiction authors (who also should have known better) fell for both as well. "Peak oil" turned out to be naïve at best, a hoax or an outright naked attempt at a power grab at worst. The extraction and production of oil have continued apace. Fossil fuels continue to fuel the world. And now we have the exact opposite of "overpopulation," as demographic disaster in the form of a demographic decline and possible collapse seems ready to strike. By the way, The Negotiator was published in early 1989, projecting the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev and the continued existence of the Soviet Union into the 1990s. By the end of the year, Mr. Forsyth's novel was out of date, as the world--as Jesus Jones sang--woke up from history.
The Negotiator is, unfortunately, a step down from Frederick Forsyth's previous books. As for The Shepherd, well, it stands alone in his oeuvre as far as I can tell. It's really just a short story or novelette, but it's expanded to fill a short book with the inclusion of illustrations, again, by Lou Feck, of airplanes, lonely skies, and deserted airfields. The Shepherd is a Christmas story, and so maybe you can look for it as the holidays approach. Like the lonely pilot in The Shepherd, England seems to need saving by its ghosts from the past. I wonder if such a ghost--King Arthur of legend, or like Merlin in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength--may come and do it. The pilot in The Shepherd is in search of an airstrip on which to land. Let it not become Airstrip One.
Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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