The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth)

The best thriller I have ever read in my life and the book that introduced me to learn to love reading fiction

No spoilers As you can tell from the other reviews here, this novel is, without a doubt, one of the best espionage thrillers ever crafted. You can find plot summaries and stellar reviews for this book on this site ad nauseam, so I'll keep my two cents short and sweet... This is a very well-thought out book pitting the most professional of assassins against a smart and determined lawman. The best part of this book is that what you would call the climax (the attempt on President de Gaulle's life) doesn't even happen until the VERY end, yet you don't even notice it. The entire book is basically dedicated to the methodical and tedious preparations the assassin must make to prepare for the job, which sounds like it would be a boring read. However, Forsyth crafts it in such a way that even though history knows the outcome of the assassination attempt(s) on the President, it is still a truly thrilling read to the end. Please read this book right now, just try to hold yourself back f... Read more

The Day of the Jackal is set during the 1960s and tells the story of a professional hitman hired to assassinate the president of France, Charles de Gaulle. The assassin is given the codename "Jackal" by his employers, hence the name of the book. The bulk of this novel is given to a detailed description of the Jackal's preparation for the assassination as well as the French government's attempts to identify and stop him. Frederick Forsyth has an unusual style of writing that is very clean and sparse in his use of language, but also highly detailed and meticulous in terms of plotting. It's obvious that he did a great deal of research before writing and every page of the novel reads as though it is describing real places and real events. His style has often been described as similar to journalism, and that's not a bad comparison. The closest thing to a weakness that I would cite is that this is not a character driven novel. While the characters are far from cardboard cutout... Read more

Fictional books about the hired assassin can be broken down into three basic tiers. From bottom up, there are the bad ones, the good ones, and, alone at the top, there is THE DAY OF THE JACKAL. Frederick Forsyth started his career off with a bang as sharp as any shot by the Jackal himself, an assassin paid half a million dollars to knock off Charles de Gaulle, President of France. In the Jackal, Forsyth creates quite possibly the leanest killing machine on the printed page. Far from killing indiscriminately, the Jackal kills those he is paid to kill, and those poor saps whose deaths are necessary to achieve the final goal. Nothing more and nothing less. His grey eyes study the target as a scientist studies the dissected squirrel in the laboratory, approaching his job with pure, cool professionalism. French Intelligence, having picked up on the plot to hire the Jackal, puts a detective on the hunt. The cat-and-mouse game that follows is exceptionally well sketched, with the ... Read more

This is a very entertaining book, enjoyable for anyone interested in modern Western politics and "espionage," without the need for precise historical accuracy. Forsyth's novel is pure fiction with a heavy dose of generally accurate non-fiction context. The setting is the unsettled political climate of 1963 France under De Gaulle. For a Western democracy, France was (and had long been) a politically unstable nation with a fidelity for its government that was as faithful as the legendary lust of the Frenchman (another myth . . .). Anyway, Forsyth's fiction is based on a plot to assassinate De Gaulle as promoted by the rebels in his army who are bitter about his abadonment of the Algerian colony. The rebels hire a shadowy professional British assassin who insists on working alone, and for big dollars. To stop him, the best of French intelligence is devoted to a continential manhunt to find a man who has not yet committed any crime to investigate and who is otherwise unknown to every... Read more