Word: jackal
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...bestselling Matarese Circle has at the base of its plot the idea of the original assassins, the hashshashin, a bunch of hashheads who practiced contract murders at the behest of an "Old Man of the Mountains." We have had Three Days of the Condor, one Day of the Jackal, even a Day of the Dolphin-all equally preposterous and plausible, thanks to the strapped imaginations of real-life bureaucrats. Who but a hack could have thought up 1978's Bulgarian defector "poison umbrella" caper in London? The first time a dolphin is hauled in for questioning, who will giggle...
...jackal still wails in Tripura, but a hundred villages are silent. Ever since native tribesmen sacked scores of Bengali immigrant settlements in the northeastern Indian state a fortnight ago, the stench of dead bodies has filled the air. In the worst massacre, in the village of Mandai, the tribals first demanded money, then corralled the Bengalis in the village market. The horrified settlers were forced to watch while tribesmen armed with guns, spears and heavy scythes called daos put the torch to dwellings and butchered their occupants. "There was blood everywhere," says Haradhem Seal, 20, a Bengali barber whose entire...
...similarity to contemporary politics, Forsyth has not written a great book, nor as good as his first novel, The Day of the Jackal. Forsyth crafts plots, and he does so better than virtually any other thriller-writer around. Plots need people, however, and that is where the troubles start...
...Cold. However convoluted his adventures, Smiley provides an anchor for every Le Carre story because he is a real person--a troubled, depressed, aging spy. Forsyth deals in Supermen, plastic men whom we will root for but never really care about as human beings. He came closest in Jackal, with his portrayal of the man who tried to assassinate Charles De Gaulle; he failed outright in his two later novels, The Odessa File, in which Superman infiltrated a society of Nazi war criminals, and The Dogs of War, in which Superman directed a coup d'etat in a small African...
Frederick Forsyth With three phenomenal successes behind him, Novelist Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War) at 39 has sworn off writing. "It's a grind, a sweat," he says. A Briton, Forsyth left England in 1974 to escape having to pay an 83% tax on royalties. After a year in Spain, he and his Ulster-born wife Carrie settled in Ireland, where they bought and refurbished Kilgarron, an 18th century manor house surrounded by 25 acres of woodland in County Wicklow. When things are dull, the Forsyths go to Dublin or London...