1972
The Odessa File
OF
An anonymous English assassin is hired to kill Charles de Gaulle — and even though history tells you he fails, you will not be able to stop turning pages.
France, 1963. The OAS — a terrorist organization of embittered ex-army officers — has repeatedly failed to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle, and its leadership is riddled with informers. Their last desperate play: hire a complete outsider, an unknown, to do the job alone. The man they contract is English, blond, immaculate, and utterly without a traceable identity. His code name is the Jackal.
The first half of the novel follows the Jackal's preparations in meticulous, hypnotic detail — the forged passports, the custom-built rifle disguised as something else entirely, the identities stolen from graveyards, the escape routes. Forsyth, a former Reuters correspondent, writes it all with a journalist's flat authority, and the effect is chillingly plausible; the book's passport-fraud method was real enough that it prompted actual changes in procedure.
The second half becomes a manhunt. Claude Lebel, a rumpled, unglamorous Paris detective, is handed an impossible task: find a man with no name, no face, and no record, before an unknown date when he will pull the trigger. You know de Gaulle survives — he died of natural causes in 1970 — and it doesn't matter at all. The chase is the thing, and no one has ever written it better.
Yes — it's the definitive assassination thriller and one of the most influential genre novels of the twentieth century, still taut and readable today.
Know its manner going in: Forsyth writes like a reporter, not a novelist. There's little interiority, minimal dialogue for long stretches, and essentially no character arc — the Jackal is a process, not a person, and Lebel is defined by competence rather than personality. Some readers find the procedural detail (gun-smithing, French bureaucracy, 1960s politics) slow, and the book's attitudes and pacing are distinctly of 1971. But that documentary coldness is exactly what generates the suspense, and the final Liberation Day sequence remains a masterclass. If you like your thrillers clinical rather than emotional, this is the peak of the form.
Two excellent ones, made fifty years apart. Fred Zinnemann's 1973 film with Edward Fox is a stone-cold classic — lean, faithful, and widely considered one of the best thriller adaptations ever made. In 2024, Sky and Peacock revived it as a series starring Eddie Redmayne as a modernized Jackal opposite Lashana Lynch's intelligence officer; it borrows the premise and tradecraft obsession rather than the plot, and was a big enough hit to be renewed for a second season. (Skip the loose 1997 Bruce Willis remake 'The Jackal' — Forsyth and Zinnemann both disowned it.)
It's built on real history but the plot is fiction. The OAS genuinely existed and really did try to assassinate Charles de Gaulle — the book opens with the actual 1962 Petit-Clamart ambush — but the Jackal himself and his contract are Forsyth's invention. The tradecraft was so realistic that the passport-fraud technique described became known as 'the Day of the Jackal fraud.'
Yes — that's the famous trick of it. Forsyth generates suspense not from whether the plot succeeds but from how close it gets and how the manhunt closes in. Knowing the ending is historically impossible somehow makes the final chapters more tense, not less.
No. The Sky/Peacock series is a modern-day reinvention: it keeps the concept — a meticulous English assassin and the dogged agent hunting him — but invents a new target, new characters, and a contemporary setting. The 1973 Edward Fox film is the faithful adaptation of the novel.
No. The Day of the Jackal is a complete standalone, as are most of Forsyth's thrillers. If you enjoy it, The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974) are the natural next reads from his classic run.
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