Recommendations from our site
“The Day of the Jackal is about Charles de Gaulle and an attempted assassination attempt on him. Forsyth is interested in French history, and the darkness in it. This book is about a real-life right-wing group called the OAS. It was a secret organization, a group of authoritarian army officers, who were trying desperately to hold on to Algeria. They didn’t like the fact that de Gaulle eventually, belatedly, realized that there was no hope of Algeria staying part of metropolitan France. And there was an attempted coup and assassination on him in real life. Forsyth writes this book in what is often described as a documentary or journalistic style…It’s a very interesting book. It’s always longer than you remember and it unfolds over quite some length. Because it’s so tightly written, you forget how much happens in it.” Read more...
Five Classic European Spy Novels
Patrick Worrall, Thriller and Crime Writer
“Essentially it consists of two interlinked hunting stories. You have the jackal, the assassin, who is stalking de Gaulle. And then you have the police and the intelligence services trying to pre-empt him, stalking him. And, to make a huge generalization, for 90% of our 300,000 years as hominids on this planet, we were hunter gatherers. It is very much in our nature, which I think explains why people are so fascinated by assassination.” Read more...
The best books on Assassinations
Michael Burleigh, Historian
“What makes the book compelling is that you are observing the mechanics of an assassin who is a really blank character. He is unnamed, apart from being called ‘the Jackal.’ He should be very blank, but it works because you buy into the idea of a traceless, faceless, ruthless killer.” Read more...
Sam Bourne, Journalist
“This has a real historical character, De Gaulle, as well as the character of the Jackal himself, the assassin. It’s very well-written in a way that perhaps my next choices aren’t, and it depicts France in the 1960s in an incredibly convincing way. It’s an amazing trick really because we all know De Gaulle wasn’t assassinated, but the whole way along we’re thinking: ‘Shit! Is he going to die?’” Read more...
Good Thrillers with Great Movie Adaptations
James Twining, Thriller and Crime Writer
