The Day of the Jackal
Frederick Forsyth, 1971
A professional assassin is hired to kill de Gaulle, and a patient detective hunts him through Europe. Cold, procedural, unbearably tense — the thriller that taught the genre its clockwork.
Frederick Forsyth
Forsyth covered France for Reuters in the early 1960s, reporting on the OAS. The Day of the Jackal was his first novel.
Feels like power and serenity.
What the last cold morning of a life feels like, timed to the minute.
It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. At that hour on March 11, 1963, in the main courtyard of the Fort d’Ivry a French Air Force colonel stood before a stake driven into the chilly gravel as his hands were bound behind the post, and stared with slowly diminishing disbelief at the squad of soldiers facing him twenty metres away. A foot scuffed the grit, a tiny release from tension, as the blindfold was wrapped around the eyes of Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, age thirty-five, blotting out the light for the last time. The mumbling of the priest was a helpless counterpoint to the crackling of twenty rifle bolts as the soldiers charged and cocked their carbines. Books by Frederick Forsyth
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