Frederick Forsyth, who died on June 9 at the age of 86, was a man of action—Royal Air Force fighter pilot, reporter in postcolonial Africa’s civil wars, even an MI6 spy—who became a novelist of action. Forsyth wrote thrillers—14 of them, as well as some short story collections, selling an estimated 75 million books. His first three novels are the classics: The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972), and The Dogs of War (1974). If they weren’t so enjoyable, they would be recognized as key novels of the Cold War and decolonization.
In The Day of the Jackal, France’s dirty war in Algeria comes home. In 1963, after Charles de Gaulle has betrayed the French Algerians and the soldiers who fought for them by granting independence to Algeria, a secret group of extreme right-wingers and hardcase soldiers hires a lone assassin to kill de Gaulle.