Bashed out in just 35 days on a knackered old typewriter sporting a bullet hole from his days as a war reporter, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day Of The Jackal — 50 years old this month — changed thriller writing for ever.
It didn’t matter that everyone knew the ending before they read it; set in the early 1960s, the plot revolves around a professional assassin’s attempt to kill Charles de Gaulle.
But the former French president had died at home several months earlier in November 1970.
Nor did it matter that Forsyth’s first novel reads more like a documentary than fiction. Or that it became the go-to manual for an alarming number of real-life hitmen.
What matters is that, over the past half century, ‘Jackal’ has sold millions of copies in myriad languages.
It has won numerous awards, inspired a hit 1973 film that turned Edward Fox into a star (although Forsyth himself missed out on a substantial portion of the profits) — and must have been read, or watched, by half the globe’s population.
So in celebration of a truly great story, Jane Fryer reveals 15 things you didn’t know about Forsyth’s global bestseller.
How it all began...
In late 1969, 31-year-old Forsyth was in a mess. A journalist just back from covering a foreign war, he’d been fired by the BBC, discredited by the Foreign Office, was broke and sleeping on a friend’s sofa. On a desperate whim, he decided to try to pay off his debts by writing a novel.
‘As a recipe for success, that’s as daft as it gets,’ he said in a recent podcast with The Spectator’s Sam Leith. ‘But I sat down on January 2, 1970 and just started to type . . . I had 500 sheets of A4 paper and an idea.’
The Day of the Jackal was bashed out in just 35 days on a knackered old typewriter by author Frederick Forsyth, 31 at the time, (pictured) sporting a bullet hole from days as a war reporter
He knew nothing about structure or chapters so, sticking to what he did know, he wrote it as a journalist might. ‘I dashed off 350 pages in 35 days and it’s never been changed. I don’t know why. Not a line, not a word, not a phrase has ever been changed from that day to this.’
Birth of The Jackal
The Jackal never had a name and it took Forsyth some time even to settle on a suitably predatory animal for his codename— the Eagle, Lion, Wolf and Bear were all considered and rejected. ‘I wanted something different,’ Forsyth has said. ‘He’s elusive. He comes in the night. He kills and he disappears by dawn. And there it was — The Jackal!’
On target for success
Best-seller: The 140,000-word manuscript was snapped up by Hutchinson & Co and sold two and a half million copies within five years
After just three rejections from publishers, the 140,000-word manuscript was snapped up by Hutchinson & Co. Within five years, it had sold two and a half million copies.
Today, Forsyth, 82, confesses that he’s still a bit bewildered at how it happened. ‘It wasn’t the result of years of struggle, practice, drafting, redrafting and endless rejections. It shouldn’t have happened this way, but it did,’ he said. ‘And it was grossly unfair to other strivers.’
Blueprint for ‘howdunnits’
The Day Of The Jackal was a ‘howdunnit’ rather than a ‘whodunnit’ and it inspired a generation of thriller writers, from Tom Clancy to Lee Child.
The intermingling of fact and fiction, and the emphasis on the minutiae of the assassination process, combined to create that extraordinary level of tension and suspense maintained throughout the book. ‘That was a completely radical change, it hadn’t been done before,’ says Child.
Art imitating life
Forsyth might have bashed it out in less than six weeks, but the book was based on a wealth of personal experience and meticulous research — both in the Reading Room in the British Library and during Forsyth’s stint in Paris during the early
