I first read The Day of the Jackal while on holiday in Spain, and so will always associate it with the scorching blue skies over the Platja de Torrenostra. In the age of Internet research, where unusual trades can be looked up on Wikipedia and foreign streets travelled via Google Maps, Forsyth is refreshing in his advocacy of 'first-hand experience': the opening scene, depicting an attack on the presidential motorcade, is all the more compelling because Forsyth was actually there when it happened. I write for money'), and employs the reporting style honed during his years as a foreign correspondent with Reuters. The novel was completed in 35 days, for purely financial reasons (in 2010 he told the Telegraph he was 'slightly mercenary. To Rodin's eye he looked like a man who retained control of himself.'Īlways cool and professional, there is a sense of the Jackal's controlled detachment in Forsyth's writing style. He looked fit, the face was sun-tanned with regular but not remarkable features, and the hands lay quietly along the arms of the chair.

The outsider brought in to do the job is an Englishman, 'about six feet tall, apparently in his early thirties, and with a lean, athletic build. In Jackal the organisation is the French secret service, the OAS, and its objective is the assassination of Charles de Gaulle (a task made all the more difficult by several failed previous attempts and the subsequently heightened security measures around the French president). The Forsyth thriller typically involves a mysterious and often shady organisation hiring the services of an equally enigmatic outsider to accomplish a seemingly insurmountable task, describing how this is accomplished in minute detail. It has also acquired a rare sheen of international notoriety since it was published in 1971: linked to the killing of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, as well as a failed assassination attempt on George W Bush ten years later, it even earned the Venezuelan terrorist 'Carlos the Jackal' his nickname after a copy of the book was reported to have been found among his possessions. Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal allows the reader to cover both options in one. The main difficulty in choosing holiday reading is deciding whether to take a thriller or something more informative and non-fictional.

The jackal frederick forsyth