Novelists sometimes go to great lengths in personally experiencing realistic details to enhance the immediacy in their art．Frederick Forsyth (American novelist) may have topped them all. When his novel The Dogs of War appeared in, few readersknew that this tale of a group of mercenaries who had overthrownan African government was based on Forsyth's own attempt to dojust that -- to overthrow, with the help of thirteen men, the government of Equatorial Guinea by kidnapping its president, Francisco Macias Nguema, in an attempt on which Forsythhad spent $100,000. But unlike his fictional mercenary, CatShannon, in the mythical country of Zangaro Forsyth failed in Equatorial Guinea when a Spanish co-conspirator did not comethrough with the ammunition. All of Forsyth's books -- which include The Day of the Jackal (about an attempt to kill DeGaulle) and The ODESSA File (on S.S.leaders still at large) -- are so meticulously researched that they often read like how-to-manuals rather than novels. His U.S. publishers, the Viking Press and Bantam Books, could not have been too surprised tolearn of Forsyth's Equatorial Guinea caper when the London Timesand the New York Times broke the news in.