Given the events that occurred subsequently he seems to have succeeded in his cause. He subsequently admitted that he used the novel and the movie as a bait to flush Roschmann. Simon Wiesenthal – the famed holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter – guided Forsyth to create a highly sensationalized version of Roschmann. Still there are moments where the narrative shines and of course there is the legend that the real-life Roschmann was forced to leave Argentina and escape to Paraguay as the book made things very hot for him. To make it dramatic he throws the kitchen sink and pretty much everything else to enliven the plot. We see it predestined that he will succeed in his hunt to set up a confrontation with Roschmann – the butcher of Riga.

He sets up the story with a great potential but he ruins it by introducing us to Peter Miller. Forsyth is a journalist who worked with Reuters and the BBC so his penchant to do meticulous research shows up. What strikes me now reading this book again after a long time is the wasted potential of the subject. By then I hadn’t been introduced to Le Carre’s real world of spies where a Smiley and his craft were legion and Rambos were just not welcome. The action moving the story to the final confrontation was all that mattered – that it was achieved by a series of happy coincidences and rather contrived plotting didn’t seem to matter. When I first read it as a teenager I found it riveting stuff coming on the back of his famous, ‘The Day of the Jackal’.

At the end of it you do conclude that it is pulp fiction for mass consumption. Such an illustrious list of writers come from this world of grey – Maugham, Greene, Fleming, Le Carre. The author admitted to have worked with British Secret Service and the streak shows. The hero – Peter Miller – is of course pure fiction and has fantasies rivaling James Bond’s capers. May be it is a crash course in Nazi history, or a historical fiction based on research. You read the novel and wonder how much of it is fiction.

The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth