The Day of the Jackal

The Day of the Jackal is a political thriller by the English writer Frederick Forsyth, published in 1971. It is about a professional assassin hired to kill the French president, Charles de Gaulle.

In 1963 a French dissident group, the OAS, hires an Englishman to shoot de Gaulle. He is unknown to every intelligence service in Europe, and he works alone, arranging false identities, documents and a rifle as the plan comes together.

The novel follows both sides at once, moving between the assassin's preparations and the efforts of the French security services to identify and stop him. It opens with the real attempt on de Gaulle's life in 1962 and then becomes fiction, and the chase is told almost step by step.

Forsyth, a former journalist, wrote the book with close attention to the technical detail of the work, which is part of why it reads as though it could be true. It won an Edgar Award in 1972 and has been adapted for film and television.