Word: jackal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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French novelist Loup Durand fills out this scenario with the graceless prose that marks other classics of the genre, including John Buchan's The Thirty- nine Steps, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and almost everything written by Ian Fleming. The boy's doomed mother Maria is not merely an eyeful, she has a "passion for beautiful things and more than enough money to indulge it . . . Coco Chanel suits, tea roses, the best restaurants, jazz, and driving her Bugatti at a reckless speed...
...assault, swift and agonizing") and the conspiratorial plotting are stock Ludlum. So is the hero, Jason Bourne. Readers of The Bourne Identity (1980) will recognize him as the cover name for David Webb, the American Orientalist who was used to lure Carlos, the international terrorist known as the Jackal...
...later novels, Le Carré gave the spy thriller all the ideological baggage that the pockets of a trench coat could handle, namely the message that espionage is a dirty business whose dirt is fairly evenly distributed on both sides. Forsyth was darkly entertaining in The Day of the Jackal, but his new book is tract writing, and its tendentious guff leaves the reader where he started, unwilling to believe and unable to escape. -By John Skow
...that they paid for the convention out of their pockets rather than dipping into public tills, Dallas is tidy, well-oiled and a most wonderful place to live-is, well, boring. It is also true. For a long time the success story was overshadowed by the act of a jackal with a firearm...
...over Algeria. He eventually gave the rebellious, predominantly Muslim province its independence, earning the animosity of the pied-noir settlers and the rightist supporters of Algérie francaise who plotted to kill him. (One assassination attempt inspired Frederick Forsyth's 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal...