'The Jackal' had Charles De Gaulle in his sight on Rue de Rennes.

“Half a million dollars is the price,” says the blonde Englishman being hired to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle. “Considering you expect to get France itself, you esteem your country very cheap,” he adds noting the shock at his fee. With the contract made, the story commences of how the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) hire ‘Charles Calcot’ - the first three letters of each name making CHA-CAL (jackal in French) - to remedy their sense of betrayal at the granting of Algerian independence.

In ‘The Day of The Jackal’ we read of the assassin’s meticulously prepared false identities: the Danish Pastor Jensen, the American student Marty Schulberg and others. He orders his custom-built weapon from the mild-mannered Belgian armourer Goossens. He tests it in a forest glade in the Ardennes, and then welds it under the chassis of his sports car as he journeys towards Paris. Yet it is through the capture and torture of OAS bodyguard Viktor Kowalski that the Action Service get their breakthrough. Then the unassuming detective, Commissaire Claude Lebel, is charged with the unenviable task of identifying and stopping the approaching ‘Jackal’.

The idea for the story came apparently to Frederick Forsyth whilst he was working as a Reuters correspondent in Paris in the early 60’s: the time in which the book’s events are set. The paramilitary organisation OAS existed as described in the book, and the Bastien-Thiry ambush in Chapter 1 is accurate. Forsyth reported from the actual scene and befriended several of De Gaulle’s bodyguards to boot. The rest of the award-winning plot, which he wrote to clear his debts, is fictional, and its success across four decades began with him commenting that he’d “never seen money like it”. Debts paid.

Unlike most novelists at the time, Forsyth used the research techniques of investigative journalism to give it an increased reality. It reads like a reconstruction of historical fact, and, that said, could have used a little more fiction-writing technique in places to add vividness. Yet what we are given is a hugely enjoyable tale of negative tension, where the reader wants something not to happen: the assassination of a French President. As the heads of various departments of state security confer nightly around a table, one can imagine similar scenes in the Paris of our times as new threats to France are faced following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Grenoble gas factory and the Thalys train. It’s to be hoped that men of Commissaire Lebel’s tenacity exist in reality as well as fiction.

And so one recent September afternoon in Paris, with the indulgence of my wife, we wandered south of the Jardin Du Luxembourg in search of the very spot where the climactic action was set. We threaded our way past pavement cafes along the Rue Vavin towards the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was an unmistakable site at 154 Rue de Rennes where on page 354 Forsyth writes: ‘Six floors up and a hundred and thirty meters away the Jackal held his rifle very steady and squinted down the telescopic sight…’ I took out my camera, focussed and shot the rooftops, recalling the scene: ‘Marchons, marchons a la Victoire’ went the national anthem as the tall, proud general in his khaki kepi hat was positioned in the crosshairs. He pins a medal on a war veteran, leans forward to kiss the man on each cheek suddenly, and… Well, as the story ends, ‘The day of the Jackal was over.’

By this reviewer: