The Day of the Jackal

Content Warning: This novel and review contain references to graphic violence, death, and antigay bias. 

The Day of the Jackal (1971), Frederick Forsyth’s first novel, has been lauded as one of the most audacious debuts in the history of the international thriller. The intricate plot, inspired by true events of the early 1960s, imagines an attempt on the life of French President Charles de Gaulle by a cold-blooded professional assassin known only as “the Jackal.” What makes the book’s relentless suspense so remarkable is that the reader already knows the outcome: Forsyth, not one to rewrite history, tells readers early on that the plot fails. The tension, then, centers on how the assassin will be foiled, and by whom.

Daringly, Forsyth makes the Jackal undeniably attractive, even admirable, in his courage, competence, intellect, and epicurean tastes akin to a murder-for-hire James Bond. At the same time, he provides him with a worthy opponent: Police Commissioner Claude Lebel, a man who seems, on the surface, to be the Jackal’s opposite in every way. Though minor developments slightly weaken the novel’s journalistic rigor, the long-distance duel of wits between these two men, each a genius in his profession, helps raise The Day of the Jackal to the white-knuckled pinnacle of the thriller genre.

In the early 1960s, French conspirators launched various failed assassination attempts against President Charles de Gaulle. Their avowed cause was de Gaulle’s “treason” in liberating Algeria, a longtime colony, from French rule. The Organisation armée secrète (OAS) was the most fanatical and well-organized of these plotters, with highly decorated French military veterans among its members. In The Day of the Jackal, set in 1963, the OAS’s failures humiliate them; they seek out a mercenary assassin, whose cold detachment will give him the deadly sangfroid so lacking in their gunmen.

In his first and only meeting with the OAS command, the assassin demands $500,000 ($5 million today) for the job. He presents as a young, blond Englishman with an athletic build and cold, impassive eyes. He will work entirely alone, accepting no help from OAS, which he believes is riddled with spies and “stool pigeons.” His only contact will be a daily phone call to a trusted agent to keep him apprised of new developments. Meanwhile, the French police have gotten wind of the conspiracy but know only that the assassin is a blond foreigner using the code name “the Jackal.” The Sûreté Nationale (France’s national police force), headed by Commissaire Claude Lebel, directs all its resources to uncovering his identity and determining when he will strike. Lebel, a short, “roly-poly,” mild-mannered detective, emerges as the story’s underdog hero.

Deducing that the Jackal might have acquired a passport under a false name, Lebel orders a search of recent applications by men of the Jackal’s age and description. Thinking that the suspect may have stolen a passport to use as a backup identity, he asks nearby countries’ police to investigate missing passports. Consequently, the SN blows three of the Jackal’s fake identities (an Englishman, a Dane, and an American) in quick succession. However, the Jackal is always a half-step ahead of them, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. When he reaches Paris (the site of the planned assassination), he vanishes.

Frederick Forsyth pulls off an astonishing coup with The Day of the Jackal, a political thriller whose foregone conclusion does nothing to slacken its exhilarating suspense. A former journalist, Forsyth reaches deep into postcolonial history, sowing his narrative with real-life figures, events, and secret organizations. This documentary-like approach gives his novel a rich verisimilitude and dramatic weight that blur the line between fiction and journalism. Forsyth also displays an insider’s knowledge of such underworld operations as passport forging and weapons smuggling, as well as the complex international (and interagency) alliances tasked with thwarting these crimes. His dazzling knowledge of these secretive milieus, together with his flawless pacing, is so compelling that his story’s built-in shortcoming hardly registers.

The obvious problem with frontloading a thriller with real-world people and events is that the reader already knows the outcome: the climactic attempt on President de Gaulle’s life will fail. Indeed, one of the first chapters informs readers that de Gaulle “lived on, to retire in peace, and eventually to die in his own house.” (53) Nonetheless, the novel’s two fictional adversaries (the Jackal and police commissioner Claude Lebel) are so evenly matched in cunning, tenacity, and courage that their long-distance game of cat-and-mouse generates unbearable suspense. Also remarkably, Lebel only enters the story around the novel’s midpoint; until then, the Jackal holds readers’ full attention with his cool intelligence, audacity, and style.

Nearly always generous with his characters, Forsyth imbues even his secondary villains with touching complexity. For instance, Kowalski, a murderous OAS henchman, abandons his safehouse in Rome to visit a daughter who (he is falsely told) is dying of leukemia, thereby dooming himself. Jacqueline Dumas, a beautiful OAS spy who serves as a “honeytrap” to funnel police secrets to the Jackal, has been lured into the murder plot by the rawest of family tragedies: a beloved brother killed in Algeria. Even with these grace notes, not a word is wasted: Forsyth’s sharp prose style, as befits a former journalist’s, is a triumph of economy, clarity, and macabre beauty. Describing how a bullet, impregnated with mercury, explodes in a victim’s head, Forsyth details how the “onward rush” of the mercury “rip[s] away the tip of the slug, splaying the lead outwards like the fingers of an open hand or the petals of a blossoming flower” (107).  

The novel’s ice-cold aplomb falters when it resorts to satiric effects that come off as too glibly ironic or cartoonishly offensive. Thus, the clownish Colonel Saint-Clair, priggishly contemptuous of the lower-class Lebel, is (of course) the loose cannon who has compromised the manhunt by falling into bed with Jacqueline Dumas. The most jarring lapse, however, comes late in the novel, when the Jackal arrives in Paris and uses the city’s LGBTQ+ community as camouflage for his blown cover. The antigay stereotypes that defile this part of the story cannot be excused by the novel’s age; they would have been ludicrous in any century, and the Jackal’s lisping, over-the-top masquerade as a gay man tears a ragged hole in the cool savoir-faire of both the Jackal and Forsyth himself.

The novel soon recovers its strength in the gut-wrenching final chapter, when the tactical genius of both Lebel and the Jackal come face à face amidst the rooftops of Paris. An icy tour de force that blends a gripping history lesson with the most propulsive of action stories, The Day of the Jackal remains a classic page-turner after over half a century and is still the gold standard for cerebral thrillers.