Frederick Forsyth, the British author of The Day of the Jackal and other bestselling thrillers, has died after a brief illness, his literary agent said. He was 86.

Jonathan Lloyd, his agent, said Forsyth died at home early on Monday surrounded by his family.

“We mourn the passing of one of the world’s greatest thriller writers,” Lloyd said.

Born in Kent, in southern England, in 1938, Forsyth served as a Royal Air Force pilot before becoming a foreign correspondent.

He covered the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, which provided inspiration for The Day of the Jackal, his bestselling political thriller about a professional assassin.

Published in 1971, the book propelled him into global fame.

It was made into a film in 1973 starring Edward Fox as the Jackal and more recently a television series starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch.

In 2015, Forsyth told the BBC that he had also worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 for many years, starting from when he covered a civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s.

Although Forsyth said he did other jobs for the agency, he said he was not paid for his services and “it was hard to say no” to officials seeking information.

“The zeitgeist was different,” he told the BBC.

“The Cold War was very much on.”

He wrote more than 25 books including The Afghan, The Kill List, The Dogs of War and The Fist of God that have sold over 75 million copies, Lloyd said.

His publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr, said that Revenge of Odessa, a sequel to the 1974 book The Odessa File that Forsyth worked on with fellow thriller author Tony Kent, will be published in August.

“Still read by millions across the world, Freddie’s thrillers define the genre and are still the benchmark to which contemporary writers aspire,” Scott-Kerr said.