Frederick Forsyth, the English writer and spy who portrayed the underworld of intelligence in now classic novels such as The Day of the Jackal, died at the age of 86.

British writer and former spy Frederick Forsyth died this Monday at the age of 86 after a brief illness. The author became a specialist in the intelligence and thriller genres , with a prolific career that included now-classic bestsellers such as The Day of the Jackal.

Born on August 25, 1938, in Ashford, Kent (southeast England), to a family with a military and fur-working tradition, he attended Tonbridge boarding school and, shortly before reaching adulthood, applied for a Knightly Scholarship to study Spanish in Málaga.

As Forsyth recounted in his autobiography 'The Intruder' (2015), in January 1956 he flew from Great Britain to Gibraltar, crossed the border on foot and took a bus from La Línea de la Concepción to the capital of the Costa del Sol.

Determined to learn the language, he called himself 'Federico', refused to live with the rest of the students to live with a local family and was absent from most of the classes of the course (160), except for the first and last.

"I hadn't spent the 158 classes I'd skipped drinking sherry. After my arrival in January, I had dedicated myself to investigating what had really brought me there: bullfighting," the Briton recounted in his book.

Books such as 'Death in the Afternoon' by Ernest Hemingway or 'Blood and Sand' by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez , sparked Forsyth's fascination with bullfighting, a spectacle he describes in his memoirs as "brutal but charged with incredible testosterone in the sand of a bullring under a blazing sun."

In Málaga, he enrolled in bullfighting school, where he practiced with a structure that replaced the stallion, but after several mornings and a few gorings, it became clear that he had no future as a matador.

Upon returning to the UK, he enlisted in the Army and became one of the youngest pilots in the Royal Air Force (RAF), before becoming a journalist, a spy for MI6 for over twenty years, and one of the world's most successful thriller novelists.

Given his talent for languages —in addition to English and Spanish , he also spoke German, French, and Russian —he decided to become a correspondent . He traveled to Paris and Berlin with Reuters; in 1965, he was sent by the BBC to the Biafran War in Nigeria and later worked as a freelance reporter.

From 1967, he worked for two decades as a spy for the British secret services (MI6), which would allow him to write in just 35 days his first and most famous novel, The Day of the Jackal , about the attempted assassination of former French President Charles De Gaulle .

Throughout his career, Forsyth wrote more than 25 books - many of which were adapted into films - which have sold more than 75 million copies .

Forsyth's works also include 'The Odessa File' (1972), 'The Dogs of War' (1974), 'The Devil's Alternative' (1979), 'The Fourth Protocol' (1984) and the short story collection 'The Veteran' (2001), among others.

In 2015, he published an autobiography titled 'The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue,' and in 2018, he published his latest book, 'Zorro,' which made Publishers Weekly's list of the best books of that year.