I remember reading THE DAY OF THE JACKAL in the early 1970s and being blown away by it. Over the years I read many other Frederick Forsyth novels and enjoyed them. His most recent ones were quite good (THE KILL LIST and THE FOX), so I was pleased to note that he hadn’t missed a step. It is with some sadness that I report on his recent passing at age 86.

Here is what Mike Ripley (DP contributor) wrote about him in an obituary for The Guardian:

Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and “bashed out” The Day of the Jackal, he “never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist”. …

Forsyth’s manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher’s sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle—an event that everyone knew did not happen.

The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly
forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal—an anonymous English assassin—almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader’s sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim.

It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers of America[’s] Edgar award for best first novel [in 1972], attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits—he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was “pathetic at money”.