Forsyth did away with the conventions of thriller-writing and still kept readers enthralled. He reset the whole genre, the author of the Jack Reacher novels writes
• Frederick Forsyth, Day of the Jackal author and former MI6 agent, dies aged 86
I remember two things about the first full week of January 1972. I passed my driving test on the Monday, and on the Friday I made my weekly trip to the library and borrowed The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. I had no idea I would one day be a writer myself – at that point I was merely an insatiable reader – but in retrospect that Friday marked an important way station on the journey from one to the other.
I gobbled up the book and thought it was fantastic – fast, pacy, exciting, suspenseful and laced with detail and intrigue. Then I thought, wait, what? How was this book working? It was a twin-track thriller – an assassin hunts his target while law enforcement hunts the assassin. But the intended victim was Charles de Gaulle, a real person, the president of France, who had died from an aneurysm in 1970. Therefore we all knew the assassin had failed. How did that not short-circuit the will-he-won’t-he suspense that thrillers seemed to require?
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