RAF Pilot, foreign affairs journalist, MI6 recruit and bestselling thriller writer.

Born in Ashford, Kent, Freddie was the son of Frederick and Phyllis. He was awarded a scholarship to the local public school at Tonbridge, before going on to university. Freddie began his career in the Royal Air Force in 1956, becoming at the time the youngest man in England to earn his wings. After two years with the RAF Freddie left to pursue his journalistic ambitions, ultimately working for Reuters, the BBC, and as a freelancer. Part of his early career was spent covering French affairs including the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle which would later provide the inspiration for The Day of the Jackal. Freddie’s notable journalistic work included his coverage of the Nigerian civil war between Biafra and Nigeria.

As an international journalist in East Germany in the 1960s, Freddie lived and worked through the extraordinary Cold War period, including the death of JFK. He found himself under constant police and Stasi surveillance, ultimately escaping back to London to diffuse a potentially explosive situation involving the East German defence minister.

Freddie’s background in foreign affairs extended beyond his journalism. It was revealed in his 2015 Memoir The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue that he had extensive involvement with MI6 starting during the 1960s. Freddie’s proficiency in journalism and political analysis, combined with with his fluency in English, German and French, led to his being approached by MI6 and ultimately to an extraordinary set of experiences, facilitating communications both in Cold War era Europe and in West Africa. Freddie’s African adventures ended with another quick escape, this time from Nigeria where a ‘dead or alive’ bounty had been put on his head!

Freddie applied his knowledge of the world, and his forensic journalistic research techniques, to his work as a thriller writer. He spent tremendous amounts of time preparing and researching each project, often travelling the world at personal risk to understand details of his characters’ dangerous professions and environments. This approach was perhaps best illustrated in the extraordinary real-life story behind Freddie’s novel The Odessa File.

During 1971, Freddie, with the help of Simon Wisenthal, uncovered the incredible story of Eduard Roschmann, the commander of the Riga ghetto known as “The Butcher of Riga”. Freddie secured the testimony of a Riga ghetto survivor recounting the real and appalling crimes of Roschmann at Riga during the Holocaust. In pursuing the story of the escape from justice of Nazi fugitives following the war, Freddie personally infiltrated clandestine groups which supported the coming of a Fourth Reich. The protagonist of The Odessa File is journalist Peter Miller, who goes on an investigative trail for Roschmann which closely follows Freddie’s real life adventures during the summer of 1971. Perhaps most extraordinary of all was when the novel, published to great acclaim and made into a film starring John Voight, resulted in the real Eduard Roschmann being finally identified and apprehended in Argentina in 1975.    

Freddie’s detailed research and hyper-realistic story telling set him apart from his peers and earned him great acclaim and commercial success with his thriller novels and short stories. Some of the recurring themes of Freddie’s works have included international politics and conspiracy, terrorism, state espionage and the actions of malevolent covert organisations. Many of the author’s works including The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and The Fourth Protocol have been adapted for the screen, with further adaptations upcoming. Freddie’s 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan was adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber into the romantic musical Love Never Dies, which has toured worldwide. Love Never Dies is an extension of the story told in the 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera.

In addition to his ongoing work as an author, Freddie also continued to work as a journalist, maintaining a regular column for The Daily Express until October 2023. Freddie won Edgar Awards in 1972 and again in 1983 and a Cartier Diamond Dagger award in 2012. Freddie was appointed CBE in the 1997 New Years Honours List for services to literature. Freddie has been married since 1994 to Sandy Molloy and lives in Buckinghamshire, England.