Avenger, by Frederick Forsyth. Published by Bantam Press in hardback, priced £17.99.

More than 70 million copies of his books have been sold so far - in more than 30 languages - but Frederick Forsyth, now 65, never planned to be a novelist.

As a young man he set out to be one of the rugged men of action whose courage and daring his novels celebrate. And he succeeded.

"When I left school I had two determinations," he says, clearly taking some pride in the unconventional course he set himself. "One was to fly, one was to be a journalist - in that order. So fly meant National Service, Air Force, at the earliest possible moment."

Aged just 19, he became the youngest pilot in the air force. "It was two years that were completely unforgettable. I went in as a boy. I came out as a man - not just in size and age but in mental preparedness for the world."

With a gift for languages and a taste for adventure, Forsyth then set about achieving his next goal - becoming a foreign correspondent.

After a three-year apprenticeship on a local paper in Norfolk, Forsyth came down to London and began asking around.

"I was very lucky. Reuters' (the international news agency) guy in Paris had a heart murmur. He was flown home at midday, I was on the evening plane out."

After covering the ferment of Paris in the early 60s - with France's empire collapsing and plots against premier General de Gaulle which would later provide him with the inspiration for The Day Of The Jackal - Forsyth moved to East Berlin, then took a job with the BBC. This took him to Nigeria, as Assistant Diplomatic Correspondent, to cover the Biafran civil war.

He often grabbed thrillers to pass the time on flights. "I thought, perhaps impudently, that I had read some stuff that had got published but was absolute rubbish. Complete tripe... I would often leave them on the plane.

"I thought I could do at least as well as some of the stuff I'd seen published."

Within two months he had finished the manuscript of The Day Of The Jackal - a book that would go on to sell nine million copies and be made into a blockbuster movie. He signed a three-book deal "and willy nilly I had changed jobs".

Now, ten carefully researched novels later, he has just published Avenger, which weaves together stories from the Vietnam, Bosnian and Second World wars, and builds to its climax just as the current 'war on terror' is about to break out in the wake of 9/11.