It has won numerous awards, inspired a hit 1973 film that turned Edward Fox into a star (although Forsyth himself missed out on a substantial portion of the profits) - and must have been read, or watched, by half the globe’s population.
What matters is that, over the past half century, ‘Jackal’ has sold millions of copies in myriad languages. Or that it became the go-to manual for an alarming number of real-life hitmen. Nor did it matter that Forsyth’s first novel reads more like a documentary than fiction. It didn’t matter that everyone knew the ending before they read it set in the early 1960s, the plot revolves around a professional assassin’s attempt to kill Charles de Gaulle.īut the former French president had died at home several months earlier in November 1970. Bashed out in just 35 days on a knackered old typewriter sporting a bullet hole from his days as a war reporter, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day Of The Jackal - 50 years old this month - changed thriller writing for ever.
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