Almost exactly 29 years ago – on November 4, 1995 – Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-Right nationalist vehemently opposed to Rabin’s efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.
The killer, Yigal Amir, was reportedly carrying a Hebrew edition of The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel in which a professional hitman is hired to eliminate French president Charles de Gaulle.
There are plenty who feel the Middle East would be a happier place now if the pragmatic Rabin had lived to pursue the peace process, yet Forsyth’s book can hardly be blamed for giving Amir handy tips on how to carry out a seismic political assassination.
After all, he shot Rabin twice at close range. In the book, the assassin aims his high-velocity rifle at de Gaulle from the window of a top-floor apartment. And there is one other even more notable difference: the Jackal missed.
Nonetheless, the wide-ranging influence of Forsyth’s debut novel has rippled down the decades. The notorious Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was nicknamed ‘Carlos the Jackal’ after the book was spotted in an apartment where he had stashed some weapons.
A heavily annotated copy was also found among the belongings of Vladimir Arutyunian after he tried to kill US President George W. Bush in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2005.
Moreover, modern writers such as Lee Child and Tom Clancy have credited The Day of the Jackal with transforming the thriller landscape for ever. It was, says Child, ‘a year-zero, game-changing thriller’. It marked a radical departure from the way things were done by the likes of Alistair MacLean and Hammond Innes, whose plots boiled down, as Child has said, to: ‘Will the bomb go off or will it be defused?’
Instead, Forsyth’s book, and the unforgettable 1973 film version starring Edward Fox, managed to generate nail-biting tension even though everyone knew the assassination attempt would end in failure.
De Gaulle died not on Liberation Day 1963 in the crosshairs of an assassin’s rifle but of an aneurysm seven years later, aged 79, watching television. It was just seven months before the publication of The Day of the Jackal.
In place of a traditional ‘will he, won’t he’ narrative, the book delved into what Child describes as the ‘minutiae’ of the preparation, based on Forsyth’s meticulous research.
And its success, according to Child, loaded a ‘millstone’ onto the shoulders of other authors. ‘We all had to perform to that same level. There was a movement throughout thriller-writing to concentrate on the detail.’
A heavily annotated copy was also found among the belongings of Vladimir Arutyunian after he tried to kill US President George W. Bush.
The Day of the Jackal is now getting a very 21st-century makeover, in a ten-part TV drama which begins next week. It stars Eddie Redmayne as the hitman, whose target is a tech tycoon allegedly based on Elon Musk.
Redmayne has small boots to fill. Edward Fox was chosen, in part, because he was decidedly slight. Roger Moore, Michael Caine, Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson were all rejected by director Fred Zinnemann.
He wanted someone ‘nimble and willowy’, and if Hollywood had never heard of him, better still. Zinnemann, who had directed major stars such as Gary Cooper in High Noon and Frank Sinatra in From Here To Eternity, instead favored a little-known actor, who could – like any effective assassin – ‘vanish in the crowd’.
He had liked Fox’s performance as the cuckolded Viscount Trimingham in the 1971 film The Go-Between. So, to the disgruntlement of the film’s financiers, Fox got the gig. It catapulted him to stardom. The Day of the Jackal made millions at the box office.
Forsyth, however, didn’t get any of them. He had declined an offer for the film rights of $45,000 plus a slice of the profits, opting instead for a flat payment of $50,000.
Nonetheless, the money and acclaim changed his life. When he sat down to write the novel he initially called The Jackal (adding ‘The Day of’ so nobody would confuse it with a nature book), he was dead broke.
Then in his early 30s, Forsyth had been an RAF pilot and then a foreign correspondent. But he was fired by the BBC and ‘smeared’ by Whitehall for, as he saw it, telling too many truths about the Biafran War in West Africa.
At the start of 1970 he was homeless as well as penniless, so on the second day of January, in the kitchen of a friend’s flat, he sat down at his trusty portable typewriter – torn by a bullet during the war – to write a novel.
It was inspired by his spell at news agency Reuters in Paris, where he covered numerous attempts on de Gaulle’s life – including one involving exploding flower vases – by the OAS, Right-wing paramilitaries opposed to Algerian independence.
He thought the OAS too riddled with informers to pull off such an assassination. Moreover, the French counter-intelligence services were the best in the world. But what if the terrorists brought in a highly-skilled outsider?
Forsyth later described his decision to write a novel as ‘lunatic’. Aside from readers knowing how the plot would end, he was breaking further rules by creating an anonymous anti-hero, then placing him at the heart of a fictional manhunt featuring real politicians and policemen.
He considered the Eagle, Lion, Wolf and Bear as codenames for his main character, before settling on Jackal, explaining: ‘He’s elusive. He comes in the night. He kills and he disappears by dawn.’
He completed the manuscript in just 35 days, but it was rejected by publisher after publisher until Hutchinson gave him a $1200 advance and a three-book contract. The Day of the Jackal came out in June 1971, followed by The Odessa File and The Dogs of War. They all became huge bestsellers.
“He’s elusive. He comes in the night. He kills and he disappears by dawn.”
As for that exhaustive research, even the Public Records Office took notice. The Jackal creates a fake identity by finding the grave of a child who’d be about the same age had he lived, then obtains his birth certificate and passport.
Forsyth knew the KGB used this method, but when the film came out in 1973 he himself warned it might be copied. The regulations were tightened, yet it is still known in official circles as the ‘Day of the Jackal fraud’.
Forsyth had no direct involvement in the making of the picture, but, once filming was under way in Paris, he was invited to meet Fox. Zinnemann kept his leading man on a tight leash, but Forsyth spirited him out of his hotel one night, promising to introduce him to a real-life contract killer.
This was Armand, a Corsican mercenary whom Forsyth had got to know in Africa. They had a discreet dinner in a bistro, until the local call-girls somehow found out there was a ‘film star’ present and flocked in, making lewd suggestions that Fox didn’t understand.
Forty years later, at his home in the Chilterns, Forsyth recounted the story to his lunch guests, who included Fox and his wife Joanna David. He said to Fox that he’d never translated what the Parisian prostitutes said to him. ‘No, you never did,’ said Fox. ‘What was it?’
‘They were offering you freebies, whatever you wanted, on the house,’ replied Forsyth.
Then well into his 70s, Fox reflected for a moment, then wryly said: ‘I don’t suppose there is any point in going back?’
The new drama will whisk us all back, those of us who devoured the book, and loved the film. Early reports are mixed. Some say the series is brilliant, others that it’s a bore. Either way, it’s hard to imagine 35 days on a battle-scarred typewriter were ever better spent.
The Day of the Jackal premieres November 14 on Peacock
Brian Viner is a writer, journalist, and film critic for the Daily Mail
