In the Beginning Was the Hunt…

FREDERICK FORSYTH DIDN’T HAVE a prototype to model the Jackal. He was the original. The lone assassin without a past and with a future he was so certain of controlling with deadly precision. Forsyth, formerly a foreign correspondent and a part-time spook for MI6, did not take a little more than a month to create him, and, defying the trend in thrillers of the time, did not place him in the crosshairs of the Cold War, the most favoured backdrop to those shadowy operatives who came from the dark recesses of the CIA and KGB. The well-groomed English gentleman in his thirties, so smooth that he could slip through dead ends with effortless style and who was not weighed down by a name or an address, was for hire, with a fee of half-a-million dollars in the early Sixties. When the Jackal appeared on the page, in 1971, he was as flawless as he was ruthless, and the reader knew, despite being the perfect assassin, he would not succeed, for, in real life, his target, Charles de Gaulle, had died a natural death a year ago. The Jackal entered the thriller canon as the hunted who never stopped being the hunter, even after knowing the cover was blown.

It was the characterisation of the Jackal, and the world he inhabited, that made Forsyth’s first novel too authentic to be missed.

In The Day of the Jackal, the killer, played to perfection in the movie version by Edward Fox, could create multiple identities with stolen passports and a visit to the cemetery—and by buying the services of the best forgers in the trade. He could get a gun custom made from a few portable cylinders. A connoisseur of camouflage, he could seduce and silence with equal flair as he crossed borders, always a step ahead of his pursuers. He was the ultimate marksman who had no time left in the end to recover from bad luck. There was no one like him before; there would be many more like him afterwards. The range of the lone assassin, answerable to none but committed to the word once the assignment was taken and the advance reached the Swiss account, didn’t go wider than the Jackal’s.

The killer’s authenticity was matched by his recruiter: the underground organisation OAS, formed by people who call themselves patriots let down by France granting independence to Algeria. The security machine that traces the assassin to his large hideout, the hunt led by the laidback Lebel, is painted with the precision of an insider, though Forsyth was not one. The template was set.

It was the same mix of authenticity and detailing that set apart his next book, The Odessa File, a thriller with the resonance of history, published one year later. The organisation here is Odessa, a secret Nazi rehabilitation project; the hunter, a freelance journalist (played by a young Jon Voight in the movie), and the hunted, a concentration camp commandant living in disguise. And Forsyth would write many more, including The Dogs of War, set in a nameless African country where mercenaries with a moral sense stage a regime change. It would be the Jackal who would add a Forsythian imprint to the epic hunt in popular fiction. You are drawn to the devil’s side in The Day of the Jackal, and you know that the Englishman is a psychopath. An assassin of his calibre can afford no emotion, not even an accidental display of conscience—and there is no adversity he has not foreseen, except perhaps the persistence of Lebel. No assassin in fiction would have gathered that much secret cheering.

There would be many avatars of the Jackal, the latest being the English actor Eddie Redmayne as the assassin in a television series remotely inspired by Forsyth. This one even has a backstory, and never misses the target. None would match the dark magnetism of the original. There will be lone assassins employed by secret organisations like Opus Dei and the Illuminati, as in the Dan Brown oeuvre; and wayfarers like Jack Reacher, courtesy Lee Child, drawn into the web of evil; and authentic thrillers like David McCloskey’s Damascus Station and Moscow X (with their insider knowledge of the CIA); and of course espionage novels by Forsyth’s more literary compatriots like the late John le Carré and the still thriving Mick Herron (his Slough House series is the source of the hit show Slow Horses). The Jackal still lingers, more than half-a-century after his burial, in barren isolation witnessed by his dogged nemesis alone, in Forsyth’s debut fiction, as an assassin who began in enigmatic anonymity and ended up as a pervasive proverb.

Edward FoxFrederick ForsythThe Day of the JackalThe Odessa File