
by Frederick Forsyth
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: June 1, 1971
Genre: espionage
Pages: 434
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime
He is known only as “The Jackal”—a cold, calculating assassin without emotion, or loyalty, or equal. He’s just received a contract from an enigmatic employer to eliminate one of the most heavily guarded men in the world—Charles De Gaulle, president of France.
It is only a twist of fate that allows the authorities to discover the plot. They know next to nothing—only that the assassin is on the move. To track him, they dispatch their finest detective, Claude Lebel, on a manhunt that will push him to his limit, in a race to stop an assassin’s bullet from reaching its target.
I decided to read this after finishing the Peacock adaptation starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, which my husband and I watched last month.
I had some fairly significant frustrations with the series, most importantly, I found basically the entire plot to be unworkable. Without going into too many spoilers, the entire series revolves around the release of some kind of a digital app that is going to drop on a specific date & at a specific time, and that a bunch of bad billionaires, including one played by Charles Dance (damn, can that man inhabit the evil rich dude character), want to derail because it is somehow going to reveal their financial chicanery to the normie plebes. They hire the Jackal to commit an impossible assassination.
My problem with the plot, and it’s a biggie, is that there is absolutely NO REASON EVER GIVEN as to why the irritating, Musk-ish, tech guy – who knows that he is the target of an assassination plot – doesn’t just release it early and make his assassination irrelevant.
Also, by the way, this iteration of the Jackal is the most incompetent master assassin of all time. The showrunner’s desire to humanize him really got in the way of him being convincing as the worlds greatest assassin. And the agent hunting him, played by Lashana Lynch, is no better, and may actually be worse. Anyway, I kind of enjoyed it, but it mostly annoyed me.
So, moving on to the book! After I decided that I would go back to the source material, I checked my kindle library and sure enough, I already owned it. This happens to me with somewhat embarrassing regularity – I bought it in June, 2018, probably because I thought my dad might want to reread it. I think it might have been be a reread for me as well, but if it was, I read it at least 35 years ago, and remembered nothing of it. There was no sense of background familiarity as I read.
The book is far superior, in my opinion. It doesn’t suffer at all from the plot problems of the television series. It’s a very engaging and believable spy thriller that relies on a lot of historical detail about the relationship between the target of the assassination – French President Charles De Gaulle – and the assassins – his former officers in the OAS who become disillusioned when he withdraws from Algeria, a former French colony. The Jackal is convincing as a baddie, but doesn’t quite reach anti-hero status – he is utterly amoral and ruthless. The French police officer hunting him is a very compelling character, and displays a lot of the best characteristics of law enforcement. He is humble and persistent, never flamboyant or attention-seeking.
The last 100 pages or so are absorbing. I really wasn’t sure how the book would end, so the tension was thick right up to the last moments.
I really love vintage spy thrillers – every time I read one, I want to read more.