The Day of the Jackal

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2024 Guest Editor Lee Child on The Day of the Jackal...

Forsyth was an unemployed foreign affairs journalist who, like unemployed people everywhere (me included), decided to write a thriller to pay the rent. The result was this seminal, year-zero novel which single handedly changed the genre forever. Two things stood out. It’s a genuinely suspenseful twin-track thriller – an assassin hunts his target while law enforcement hunts the assassin – but, Forsyth being the journalist he was, it’s written like a hyper-detailed retrospective true crime account. And secondly, the intended victim was a real person – Charles de Gaulle, the president of France. We knew he was still alive – he was in the news all the time – so we knew in advance that the assassin must have failed. How did that not short-circuit the foundational suspense? I learned that the how question was as important as any other. We knew the who, where, why and when. But we didn’t know how the assassin was going to do it, or how he was going to be stopped. Fifty years later, it would be interesting to get reactions from newer, younger readers, for whom de Gaulle is just a name from ancient history – or possibly a made-up character. Would the book work as well for them? I suspect it would.

August 2014 Guest Editor Gerald Seymour on The Day of the Jackal...

I have big respect for Frederick Forsyth. There have been very few lurches in direction for thriller writers in the last half century. Ian Fleming changed direction with the Bond books, but Freddie set the tone with ‘Day of the Jackal’ and he has had a wheelbarrow load of imitators but no equals. The style demands detail and authenticity but is never mechanical: it is one of those stories that keeps new readers, and the old ones who dip back in every few years to repeat the pleasures, up half the night.  A real page turner.

Matthew Dunn, author of The Spycatcher, on The Day of the Jackal...

I read the book when I was a teenager and was captivated by the notion that a single man could be employed to kill a president and thereby allow for a regime change in France.  Seen largely from the perspective of the assassin The Jackal, the book follows his meticulous preparations, while being pursued by French agencies, leading to the moment he has Charles de Gaulle in the crosshairs of his custom made sniper rifle.  We know he won’t kill him (de Gaulle died of natural causes in old age) but that doesn’t matter because the book isn’t about whether the assassination will succeed, but rather how could it happen.  A thriller masterpiece.

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