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I enjoy his writing style, and particularly his willingness to indulge in paragraphs of dryly humorous details, usually of the technical and operational varieties. For all their flaws, he and a few others (e.g. Alistair MacLean) have a particular flavor of "very competent protagonist relying on their wits and Very Particular Set of Skills" that other authors can't execute quite as well.

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> very competent protagonist relying on their wits and Very Particular Set of Skills

Writing these characters without creating Mary or Marty Sues is really damn hard.

If you like this sort of thing, a novel I would heartily recommend is "Kolymsky Heights" by a much neglected (and long dead) author Lionel Davidson.

The Guardian has a short piece from 2014 that describes the plot. Great setup and a particular sort of cultural and linguistic skillset :

"Porter, however, is descended from Canadian Inuits, who remain – physically, ethnically and culturally – virtually identical to their Siberian counterparts, despite the decades-long political rift between the two."

From : https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/03/book...

Great great novel. I thought of it for my earlier comment in this thread (though decided not to mention), as I definitely see Forsyth as an influence on the detailed planning in KH.

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