The Day of the Jackal
1971 UK 1st Edition cover (spine & front)
Author(s)	Frederick Forsyth
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Spy, Thriller, Historical novel
Publisher	Hutchinson & Co (UK) Viking Press (US)
Publication date	June 7, 1971 (UK) August 6, 1971 (US)
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	358 pp (first edition, UK) 380 pp (first edition, US)
ISBN	ISBN 0-09-107390-1 [Amazon-US | Amazon-UK] (first edition, hardback)
OCLC Number	213704
Dewey Decimal	823/.9/14
LC Classification	PZ4.F7349 Day3 PR6056.O699

The Day of the Jackal (1971) is a thriller novel by English writer Frederick Forsyth about a professional assassin who is contracted by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organization, to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.

The novel received admiring reviews and praise when first published in 1971, and it received a 1972 Best Novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The novel remains popular, and in 2003 it was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read.^[1]

While the OAS did exist as described in the novel, and the book opens with an accurate depiction of the attempt on the life of President de Gaulle led by Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, the subsequent plot is fiction.

Contents 1 Plot summary 1.1 Part One: Anatomy of a Plot 1.2 Part Two: Anatomy of a Manhunt 1.3 Part Three: Anatomy of a Kill 1.4 Epilogue 2 How and why Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal 3 Publishing history 4 Film adaptations 5 References to historical persons, places or events 6 Future influences 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Plot summary []

Part One: Anatomy of a Plot []

The book begins with the historical, failed attempt on de Gaulle's life planned by Col. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart. After Bastien-Thiry's arrest, the French security forces wage a short but extremely vicious "underground" war with the terrorists of the OAS, a militant right-wing group who have labeled de Gaulle a traitor to France after his grant of independence to Algeria. The French secret service, particularly its covert operations directorate (the "Action Service"), is remarkably effective in infiltrating the terrorist organization with their own informants, allowing them to kidnap and neutralize the terrorists' chief of operations, Antoine Argoud. The failure of the Petit-Clamart assassination, and a subsequent attempt at the École Militaire, coupled with Bastien-Thiry's eventual execution by firing squad, likewise cripple the morale of the terrorists.

Argoud's deputy, Lt. Col. Marc Rodin, carefully examines their few remaining options and determines that the only way to succeed in killing de Gaulle is to hire a professional assassin from outside the organization, someone completely unknown to either the French authorities or the OAS itself. After inquiries, he contacts an Englishman (whose name is never given), who meets with Rodin and his two principal deputies in Vienna, and agrees to assassinate de Gaulle for the sum of $500,000 (about $2.87 million in 2013). The four men agree on his code name, "The Jackal."

The remainder of Part One describes the Jackal's exhaustive preparations for the assassination. First, he acquires a legitimate British passport under a false name, under which he plans to operate for the majority of his mission. He also steals the passports of two foreign tourists visiting London who superficially resemble the Jackal, for use in an emergency.

Using his primary false passport, the Jackal travels to Belgium, where he commissions a specialized sniper rifle of great slimness and an appropriate silencer from a master gunsmith, and a set of forged French identity papers from a master forger. When picking up his fake identity papers, the master forger attempts to blackmail the Jackal but the Jackal kills him and locks the body in a large trunk inside the forger's house, where he correctly deduces it will not be found for a long time. After exhaustively researching a series of books and articles by, and about, de Gaulle, the Jackal travels to Paris to reconnoiter the most favorable spot and the most likely day for the assassination.

After orchestrating a series of armed robberies in France, the OAS is able to deposit the first half of the Jackal's fee in his bank in Switzerland.

At the same time, the French secret service, curious about the actions of Rodin and his subordinates, fake a letter that lures one of Rodin's bodyguards to France, where he is captured and interrogated, before dying. Interpreting his incoherent ramblings, the secret service is able to piece together Rodin's plot, but without knowing the name or the exact description of the assassin.

When told about the plot, de Gaulle (who was notoriously careless of his personal safety) refuses, absolutely, to cancel his public appearances, modify his normal routines, or even allow any kind of public inquiry into the assassin's whereabouts to be made. Any inquiry, he orders, must be done in absolute secrecy.

Roger Frey, the French Minister of the Interior, convenes a meeting of the heads of the French security forces. Since Rodin and his men have taken refuge at a hotel in Rome under heavy guard, they cannot be captured and interrogated. The rest of the meeting is at a loss to suggest how to proceed, except a Commissioner of the Police Judiciare, who reasons that their first and most essential step is to establish the Jackal's identity, which is a job for a detective. When asked to name the best detective in France, he volunteers his own deputy commissioner, Claude Lebel.

Part Two: Anatomy of a Manhunt []

Granted special emergency powers to conduct his investigation, Lebel does everything he can to discover the Jackal's identity. He first calls upon his "old boy network" of foreign intelligence and police contacts to inquire if they have any records of a top-class political assassin. Most of the inquiries are fruitless, but in the United Kingdom, the inquiry is eventually passed on to the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, and another veteran detective, Superintendent Bryn Thomas.

A search through Special Branch's records turns up nothing, however one of Thomas's subordinates suggests that if the assassin were an Englishman, but primarily operated abroad, he would be more likely to come to the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service. Thomas makes an informal inquiry with a friend of his on the SIS's staff, who mentions hearing a rumor from an officer stationed in the Dominican Republic at the time of President Trujillo's assassination. The rumor states that a hired assassin stopped Trujillo's car with a rifle shot, allowing a gang of partisans to finish him off; and moreover, that the assassin was an Englishman, named Charles Calthrop.

To his surprise, Thomas is summoned in person by the Prime Minister (unnamed, but likely intended to represent Harold Macmillan), who informs him that word of his inquiries has reached higher circles in the British government. Despite the enmity felt by much of the government against France in general and de Gaulle in particular, the Prime Minister informs Thomas that de Gaulle is his friend, and that the assassin must be identified and stopped at all costs. Thomas is handed a commission much similar to Lebel's, with temporary powers allowing him to override almost any other authority in the land.

Checking out the name of Charles Calthrop, Thomas finds a match to a man living in London, said to be on holiday in Scotland. While Thomas confirms that this Calthrop was in the Dominican Republic at the time of Trujillo's death, he does not feel it is enough to inform Lebel. But then one of his junior detectives realizes that the first three letters of his Christian name and surname form the French (and Spanish) word for Jackal, Chacal. Thomas calls Lebel immediately.

Unknown to any member of the council in France, the mistress of one of them (an arrogant Air Force colonel attached to de Gaulle's staff) is actually an OAS agent. Through pillow talk, the colonel unwittingly feeds the Jackal a constant stream of information as to Lebel's progress.

The Jackal enters France by way of Italy, driving a rented Alfa Romeo sports car with his special gun hidden in the chassis. On receiving word from the OAS agent that the French are on the lookout for him, he decides his plan will succeed nevertheless, and forges ahead.

In London, the Special Branch raids Calthrop's flat, finding his passport, and deduce that he must be travelling on a false one. When they work out the name of the Jackal's primary false identity, Lebel and the police come close to apprehending the Jackal in the south of France. But thanks to his OAS contact, the Jackal checks out of his hotel early and evades them by only an hour.

With the police on the lookout for him, the Jackal takes refuge in the château of a woman whom he seduced while she was staying at the hotel the night before. When she goes through his things and finds the gun, he kills her and escapes again. The murder is not reported until much later that evening, allowing the Jackal to assume one of his two emergency identities and board the train for Paris.

Part Three: Anatomy of a Kill []

Lebel becomes suspicious of what the rest of the council label the Jackal's "good luck", and has the telephones of all the members tapped, which leads him to discover the OAS agent. The Air Force colonel withdraws from the meeting in disgrace and later resigns from his post. When Thomas checks out and identifies reports of stolen or missing passports in London in the preceding months, he closes in on the Jackal's remaining false identities.

On the evening of August 22, 1963, Lebel deduces that the Jackal has decided to target de Gaulle on Liberation Day, on 25 August, the day commemorating the liberation of Paris during World War II. It is, he realizes, the one day of the year when de Gaulle can be counted on to be in Paris, and to appear in public. Considering the inquiry all but over, the Minister orchestrates a massive, city-wide manhunt for the Jackal under his false name(s), and dismisses Lebel with hearty congratulations.

However, the Jackal has eluded them yet again. By pretending to be homosexual in one of his false guises, he allows himself to be "picked up" by another man and taken to his apartment, where he kills the man and remains hidden for the remaining three days, thus avoiding identification through hotel registrations, which are examined by the police.

On the day before the 25th, the Minister summons Lebel again and tells him that the Jackal still cannot be found. Lebel listens to the details of the President's schedule and security arrangements, and can suggest nothing more helpful than that everyone "should keep their eyes open."

On the day of the assassination, the Jackal, disguised as a one-legged French war veteran, passes through the police checkpoints, carrying his custom rifle concealed in the sections of a crutch. He makes his way to an apartment building overlooking the Place du 18 Juin 1940 (in front of the soon-to-be-demolished façade of the Gare Montparnasse), where de Gaulle is presenting medals to a small group of Resistance veterans.

As the ceremony begins, Lebel is walking around the street on foot, questioning and requestioning every police checkpoint. When he hears from one CRS officer about a one-legged veteran with a crutch, he realizes what the Jackal's plan is, and rushes into the apartment building, yelling for the CRS man to follow him.

In his sniper's rest, the Jackal readies his rifle and takes aim at de Gaulle's head. Yet his first shot misses by a fraction of an inch, when de Gaulle unexpectedly leans forward to kiss the cheeks of the veteran he is honoring. The Jackal begins to reload.

Outside the apartment, Lebel and the CRS officer arrive on the top floor in time to hear the sound of the first, silenced shot. The CRS man shoots off the lock of the door and bursts in. The Jackal turns and fires, killing the young policeman with a shot to the chest.

At last, confronting each other, the assassin and the police detective — who both had developed grudging, mutual respect for each other in the long chase — briefly look into each other's eyes, each recognizing the other for who he is. The Jackal scrambles to load his third and last rifle bullet, while Lebel, unarmed, snatches up the dead policeman's MAT-49 submachine-gun. Lebel is faster, and shoots the Jackal with half a magazine-load of bullets, instantly killing him.

Epilogue []

In London, the Special Branch are cleaning up Calthrop's apartment when the real Charles Calthrop storms in and demands to know what they are doing. Once it is established that Calthrop really has been on holiday in Scotland and has no connection whatsoever with the Jackal, the British are left to wonder "If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?"

The Jackal is buried in an unmarked grave in a Paris cemetery, officially recorded as "an unknown foreign tourist, killed in a car accident." Aside from the priest, the only person attending the burial is Police Inspector Claude Lebel, who then leaves the cemetery to return home to his family.

How and why Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal []

Over the three years immediately prior to his writing The Day of the Jackal Frederick Forsyth spent most of his time in west Africa covering the Biafran war, first for the BBC in 1967 and then for another eighteen months as a free lance journalist in 1968-69. Upon his return to Britain his first book, the non-fiction The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend about that brutal civil war during which Nigeria fought to prevent the secession of its eastern province, was published as a paperback by Penguin Books in late 1969.^[2][3] To Forsyth's disappointment, however, the book sold very few copies and so with the arrival of the 1970s the then 31-year old free lance journalist, international adventurer, and onetime youngest (at 19) fighter pilot in the RAF found himself both out of work and "flat broke". In order to solve his financial problems he thus decided to try his hand at fiction by writing a political thriller as a "one-off" project in order to "clear his debts".^[4][5] Unlike most novelists, however, Forsyth would employ the same type of research techniques that he had used as an investigative reporter to bring a sense of increased reality to his work of fiction, a story which he first began to consider writing in 1962-63 while posted to Paris as a young Reuters foreign correspondent.^[6]

When Forsyth arrived in 1962 French President Charles de Gaulle had just granted independence to Algeria to end the eight-year Algerian War, a highly controversial act that had incurred the wrath of the ultra-right terrorist group Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) which then vowed to assassinate him. Forsyth befriended several of the President's bodyguards and on August 22, 1962 personally reported from the scene of the failed assassination attempt along the Avenue de la Liberation during which de Gaulle and his wife narrowly escaped death in a fusillade of gunfire in the roadside ambush, the most serious of six overall attempts the OAS would make on his life.^[7] Forsyth incorporated a dramatized account of that real life event (in which several of de Gaulle's bodyguards had been killed) to open his new novel throughout which he also utilized many other aspects and details about France, its politics, the OAS, and international law enforcement that he had learned during his career as an investigative journalist.^[8][9]

Publishing history []

Although Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal in just 35 days in January and February, 1970, it remained unpublished for almost a year-and-a-half thereafter as he sought a publisher willing to accept his unsolicited approximately 140,000 word manuscript. Four publishing houses rejected it between February and September on the grounds that their editors' believed a fictional account of the OAS hiring a British born assassin in 1963 to kill Charles de Gaulle would not be commercially successful as he had never been shot and when the book was written de Gaulle was still alive and retired from public life. The editors told Forsyth that they felt that these well known facts essentially neutralized the suspense of his fictionalized assassination plot against de Gaulle as readers would already know it would not and could not have been successful.^[10] (De Gaulle subsequently died of natural causes at his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in November, 1970.^[11]) Forsyth eventually persuaded London based Hutchinson & Co. to take a chance on publishing his novel, however they only agreed to a relatively small initial printing of just 8,000 copies for its 358-page red and gold clothbound first edition. Although not formally reviewed by the press prior to its initial June, 1971 UK publication, wide spread word of mouth discussion resulted in brisk advance and post publication sales leading to repeated additional printings (including some prior to its official June 7 publication date) being ordered from Hutchinson's longtime printer, Anchor Press Ltd (Tiptree, Essex), to meet booksellers' unexpectedly strong demand.^[10][12][13]

The book's unexpected success in Britain soon attracted the attention of New York based Viking Press which quickly acquired its US publication rights for $365,000 (£100,000) — a then very substantial sum for such a work and especially for that of a first time author. The US rights fees (the equivalent of more than $2,000,000 in 2013) were split equally between Hutchinson and Forsyth which led the heretofore self described "flat broke" author to observe later that he had "never seen money like it and never thought I would."^[10][12] Just two months after its publication in the UK the 380-page cloth bound Viking first edition was released in the US on August 6, 1971 at $7.95 and with a distinctive jacket designed by noted American artist Paul Bacon.^[14][15]

The US first edition's launch was considerably aided by two glowing reviews in the New York Times by senior daily book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt three days before its release, and by the American mystery writer Stanley Bernard Ellin the week after.^{[16][17][N 1]} In mid-October it reached #1 on the Times "Best Seller List" for fiction and by mid-December 136,000 copies of Viking's US edition were already in print.^[18][19] Over two-and-a-half million copies were sold worldwide by 1975.^[20] As in the UK, over forty years later The Day of the Jackal still remains in print in the US published now by Penguin Books (which acquired Viking in 1975) as a New American Library imprint.^[21][22] Hundreds of other print, electronic, and audio editions have been produced around the world since 1971 with many more millions of copies now in print in both English and the thirty other languages to which it has been translated including Spanish, German, French, Russian, Czech, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai.^[6][14]

The Day of the Jackal was serialized in 1971 in both the London Evening Standard and Israel's oldest daily newspaper, Ha'aretz.^[14] Earning Forsyth the 1972 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, in 1973 it was also made into a 143-minute feature film. In 2011 a number of special "40th Anniversary" editions of The Day of the Jackal were released in the UK, US, and elsewhere to commemorate the four decades of continuous success of the book, the first of 18 more Forsyth novels and collections of his short stories published since the 1971 release of his seminal debut thriller.^[23]

Film adaptations []

• The film The Day of the Jackal was released in 1973, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Fox as The Jackal, Michael Lonsdale as Lebel, and Derek Jacobi as Caron.
• An Indian film in Malayalam entitled August 1 (1988), directed by Sibi Malayil, is loosely based on the novel. It stars Mammootty, Captain Raju and Sukumaran in pivotal roles.^[24]
• A film entitled The Jackal, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, was released in 1997. The film is loosely based on the plot of the novel, featuring an unnamed assassin (Bruce Willis) being hired to kill a high-ranking figure in the United States by the Russian mafia. However, there are few other similarities, and both Zinnemann and Forsyth lobbied to have the film's name changed to disassociate it from Forsyth's novel.

References to historical persons, places or events []

• Forsyth was a reporter for Reuters in France at the time of the novel's writing and borrowed much of his detail from actual incidents he reported on. These included the assassination attempt on de Gaulle at Petit-Clamart, and the arrest, trial, and execution of Bastien-Thiry. Likewise, the OAS did exist, inspired by the Gaullist government's 1962 cession of independence to Algeria after the Algerian War.
• The Jackal may have been partially inspired by an assassin employed by the French SDECE during the Algerian War, known only as "the Killer," who specialized in killing arms traffickers in creative ways (including a poison dart fired from a hand-propelled blowgun, and a limpet mine filled with ball bearings).
• Though virtually nothing of the Jackal's past history is explored, he finds several of his underworld contacts through an old friend whom he knew in Katanga, indicating he is an ex-mercenary with a military or quasi-military background. Forsyth also reported on European mercenaries' involvement with several African conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, which inspired his third novel, The Dogs of War (1974).
• One of the potential candidates for the assassin considered by both Rodin and Lebel is an elderly ex-SS officer formerly employed as a contract killer for ODESSA, the underground organization of ex-Nazi war criminals. The ODESSA and its activities form the background of Forsyth's subsequent novel, The Odessa File (1972).
• Both Lebel and the Jackal refer to the deceased Roger Degueldre as the closest thing the OAS has to a professional political killer.
• At the time of his summoning from the OAS, the Jackal has just completed the assassinations of two German missile engineers, recruited to work on President Nasser's heavy rocket program in Egypt. This recruiting effort, and the Egyptians' continuing pursuit of the program, likewise form part of the plot of The Odessa File.
• Thomas's SIS contact mentions the defection of Kim Philby in 1962, and the shake-up of the SIS's organization and personnel precipitated by it.
• Forsyth lauds de Gaulle's security forces as among the best in the world, and refers to an event (which may or may not have happened) in which de Gaulle's security advisors were invited to view the similar arrangements of the United States Secret Service, and came away with a derisive opinion - which, Forsyth writes, seems to have been borne out by the later assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 (the year the novel takes place), in contrast to de Gaulle's death in 1970 from natural causes. However, Forsyth befriended most of De Gaulle's security detail while as a journalist for Reuters in Paris so this may be true.
• The enmity between the governments of France and the United Kingdom is largely ascribed to de Gaulle's forceful rejection, earlier in 1963, of the United Kingdom's bid to enter the European Common Market.
• The British Prime Minister is only beginning to recover from the stress caused by the Christine Keeler scandal earlier that year.

Future influences []

• A copy of the Hebrew translation of The Day of the Jackal was found in possession of Yigal Amir, the extreme-right militant who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on 4 November 1995. As published in the Israeli press at the time, police investigators believed that the assassination was partially inspired by the book, and that Amir used it as a kind of "how to" manual. However, the method of assassination employed by the novel's Jackal is quite different from Amir's murder of Rabin. In particular, the Jackal intended to kill DeGaulle with a high-powered rifle at long range. Amir shot Rabin nearly point-blank with a handgun.
• Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as "Carlos" was nicknamed "The Jackal" by the press after a reporter with The Guardian newspaper erroneously reported that the novel was found among the terrorist's possessions (which were with his friend Angela Otaola in London).
• The method for acquiring a false identity and UK passport detailed in the book is often referred to as the "Day of the Jackal fraud" and remains a well known security loophole in the UK.^[25] The technique was most recently used by John Darwin to obtain a new passport after he faked his own death in a canoeing accident.
• Would-be assassin Vladimir Arutinian, who attempted to kill US President George W. Bush during his 2005 visit to the Republic of Georgia, was an obsessive reader of the novel and kept an annotated version of it during his planning for the assassination.
• The New Zealand Member of Parliament David Garrett claimed the novel's description of identity theft inspired him to create his own fake passport as a "youthful prank".^[26] The incident further inflamed a national controversy over the law and order campaigner's criminal history.^[27]

See also []

• Assassinations in fiction
• Citroën DS
• Cordite, which the assassin ingests in order to appear ill
• The Jackal
• Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry

References []

Notes

References

External links []

• Frederick Forsyth discusses The Day of the Jackal on the BBC World Book Club
• The Day of the Jackal at FactBehindFiction.com
• The Way of the Jackal