The Day of the Jackal

By spring the right-wing OAS in France, infuriated by Charles de Gaulle's withdrawal from Algeria, had faied in six known attempts to assassinate the General. Now they sought to hire an outsider, a professional killer-for-hire who would be unknown to the French police. Before three of the OAS leaders in a Vienna hotel room stands a blond, gray-eyed Englishman who sums up for them the creed of the professional:

"A professional does not act out of fervour and is therefore more calm and less likely to make elementary errors. Not being idealistic, he is not likely to have second thoughts at the last minute about who might get hurt in the explosion or whatever method, and being a professional he has calculated the risks to the last contingency. So his chances of success on schedule are surer than anyone else's, but he will not even enter into operation until he has devised a plan that will enable him not only to complete the mission, but to escape unharmed."

The code name of this killer: Jackal. His price: half a million dollars. His demand: total secrecy, even from his employers.

That everyone knows President de Gaulle ultimately died a natural death does not for m instant detract from the die-cut reality of this driving and remarkable novel of terror, suspense, human malevolence, and triumph. Let any skeptic simply begin and he will soon he hooked and then enthralled.

Step by painstaking step we follow the Jackal in his meticulous planning, from the fashioning of a collapsible but powerful rifle, the theft of passports, the forging of documents, the devising of alternate identities, to the laying out of his mazelike approach to the time and the place where the General is to meet the Jackal's specially made bullet. Even as he ruthlessly silences anyone in his way, it is hard to withhold a kind of admiration from this icy and brilliant agent of doom.

Though he cannot know it, the main obstacle standing athwart the Jackal's path is a small, diffident, and rumpled policeman, Deputy Commissaire Claude Lebel. Lebel's bum considers him the best detective in France, but he himself cannot feel much confidence as he begins to track down a killer he knows exists but whose plans and identity are—a blank. Deliberately, with round-the-clock assistance from police all over Europe and in London and America, Lebel pieces together the Jackal's image. As his disguises and movements are ferreted out, trap after trap is sprung, but only on the heels of the quarry. As the last second approaches, when the Jackal's crosshairs come to rest on that unmistakable profile, it is all the reader can do not to cry out in warning.