Jackal (The Day of the Jackal)

At the beginning of the novel, the Jackal plans to continue working as an assassin until he has enough money to retire. The money paid to the Jackal to assassinate an Egyptian target had been enough to keep him in luxury for several years, but the offer of US$500,000 (about US$4 million in 2017 dollars) from the OAS to kill de Gaulle gives him the opportunity to retire early. Despite his concern over the "security slackness of the OAS", he finds the job too tempting to turn down. However, he insists that the OAS leaders in charge of the plot must not talk to anybody about the matter, and suggests they stay somewhere under heavy guard until the assassination is complete.

The assassin invents the codename of the Jackal after he is hired by the OAS conspirators. When asked for his choice of codename in the novel, the Jackal replies: "Since we have been speaking of hunting, what about the Jackal? Will that do?".[2]

Taking elaborate precautions, the Jackal arranges a false passport and forged identity documents to get him into France to get him close to de Gaulle. He also steals two passports as contingent identities and purchases disguises to match, as well as a specially made sniper rifle. He kills the forger, who attempts blackmail him for more money. He later goes to France to reconnoitre the best location and does research about Charles de Gaulle, before concluding that the best time to kill the French President is on Liberation Day.

Unfortunately for the Jackal, the French Action Service is able to capture and interrogate Rodin's personal bodyguard, one of the few men who is broadly aware of a plot, if not the actual details. Through Kowalski the Action Service is not only made aware of the plot, but the Jackal's code name and a broad description.

Using OAS agent "Valmy" as a cut-out, the Jackal is kept fully informed of the French police's pursuit of him. On two occasions when the police get too close, he hides out in the home of a stranger he has seduced; once with a wealthy woman and again with a gay man he meets in a bar. He kills the former when she finds the components of his weapon, and the latter after the man watches a news report which warns people to be careful of the man who the Jackal is currently posing as.

Finally, on 25 August 1963, Liberation Day, the Jackal tries to shoot de Gaulle with his rifle, which he had hidden inside a stainless steel crutch. However, the French president unexpectedly moves his head at the last moment, causing the Jackal to miss. As the Jackal prepares for a second shot, he is discovered by French police detective Claude Lebel. He uses his second shot to kill a CRS trooper who accompanied the detective to the room, but Lebel kills him with the trooper's MAT-49 before the Jackal can load his third bullet. The Jackal is buried two days later in an unmarked grave; only Lebel attends, anonymously. The death certificate identifies him as "an unknown foreign tourist, killed in a car accident".

Later, Charles Calthrop arrives home from vacation to find British police raiding his flat. He demands to know what is happening and is brought to the police post for questioning. It is subsequently established that Calthrop was indeed on a holiday. Both the film and the novel end with the same comment by British authorities, when their suspect, Charles Calthrop, arrives home from vacation, alive: "If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?"

The Jackal is described as a tall, blond Englishman in his early thirties living in Mayfair, London.[3] The character's real name is unknown and details of his background are sketchy. Forsyth explains in the novel, "Alexander Duggan who died at the age of two and a half years in 1931 ... would have been a few months older than the Jackal in July 1963".[4] He is described by Forsyth as six feet tall, with a muscular build and few distinguishing features, one of which are his cold grey eyes. In the novel, it is stated he likes to wear striped shirts.[5] During the course of the novel he changes his hair colour frequently.[6]

The Jackal uses a numbered Swiss bank account to hold the proceeds of his work. He is a careful, sophisticated and meticulous killer who plans every detail of each assassination well in advance. He has multiple successful contracts, but no record or file on any European police force. During the course of the novel he uses a Congo mercenary called Louis, whom he met in Katanga as a character reference and who puts the Jackal in touch with a skilled armourer who fabricates the assassin's rifle and a forger who provides false identification papers. In order to get a false identification paper, the Jackal gives his own driver's licence to the forger with the claim that the card belongs to a dead man; when the forger tries to blackmail him for more money, the Jackal kills him.

The Jackal speaks fluent French and is sufficiently skilled in hand-to-hand combat that he can kill with his bare hands. He is skilled with handguns and a marksman with a rifle. He has managed to remain anonymous except to those select few who recommend him for work. He considers his anonymity his main weapon and prefers to carry out missions alone.[7]

In the novel, the international police forces hunting him speculate that he may have helped assassinate Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic by shooting the driver of his armoured car, causing it to crash.[8] The 1973 film version tells not only was he involved in Trujillo's death but also killed a V.I.P. identified only as "that fellow from the Congo".

Before he is approached by the OAS, the Jackal's only known confirmed kills are of two German rocket scientists in Egypt, who were helping Nasser build rockets to attack Israel. He performed this task at close range using a small-calibre weapon, a crime that left the Egyptian government furious and baffled. The Jackal was paid by a Zionist millionaire in New York, who considered his money "well spent".[9] While his last job has made him well off, he takes the OAS contract because he wishes to retire.

The Jackal's true name is never discovered by the authorities or revealed to the reader. He uses the following identities in the course of the novel:

• Alexander James Quentin "Alex" Duggan: This is the name of a boy who was born in 1929, the same year that the Jackal was born, but died aged two and a half in a car accident. The Jackal obtains Duggan's birth certificate under false pretences and applies for a passport in this name but with his own photograph and details.
• Per Jensen: A pastor from Copenhagen who bears a reasonable resemblance to the Jackal but is older with iron grey hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. The man steals Pastor Jensen's passport from his London hotel room and adopts the disguise after his cover as Duggan is blown by both the French police and a woman he seduces and hides out with.
• Martin "Marty" Schulberg: A student from Syracuse University who is also somewhat similar to the Jackal but is younger with chestnut brown hair and heavy-rimmed executive spectacles. The Jackal steals Schulberg's handgrip containing his passport from London airport and adopts the disguise when he realises the police must be on to Jensen, enhancing his cover to avoid them by posing as a flamboyant homosexual.
• André Martin: A fictitious French war veteran from Alsace-Lorraine, Martin is in his 50s and has only one leg, necessitating walking around with an aluminium crutch. The Jackal becomes Martin — complete with French identity card and war wounded card courtesy of a Belgian forger — by dyeing his hair grey and cutting it badly, swallowing a couple of pieces of cordite to make himself sick and affect a pale complexion, and folding his leg back and binding it with a webbing strap to mimic an amputated leg.
• Charles Calthrop: Charles Calthrop is the name of a former small-arms salesman who was in the Dominican Republic at the time Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was shot. The SIS later heard a rumour that Calthrop has helped the partisans kill Trujillo by shooting the driver of his armoured car, causing it to crash. The British police in the book surmise that Calthrop is the Jackal's real name, until the real Calthrop shows up at the end, after the Jackal was killed. The authorities were misled by the fact that chacal (i.e., Cha[rles] Cal[throp]) is French for "jackal". Police investigations show that the real Charles Calthrop went on a holiday with what looked like fishing rods in his car, leading the police to believe that he was armed with weapons. When the Jackal learns the French are looking for a Charles Calthrop, he doesn't react with any apparent concern (as might be the case if it were his real name).

• Forsyth, Frederick. The Day of the Jackal. Arrow Books, 1995 (Original; Hutchinson, 1971), ISBN 0-09-955271-X
• Bookbinder, Robert. Films of the Seventies. Citadel Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0-8065-0927-3
• Zinnemann, Fred. The Day of the Jackal, Universal Studios, 1973. (DVD)