Caveat for the General

By * T.F.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL by Frederick Forsyth. 380 pages. Viking. $7.95.

John Wilkes Booth at least had the grace to shout "Sic semper tyrannis!" Until lately, most political assassins have felt obliged to dress up their acts of public murder with some pretext of historic purpose. But the Jackal, an Englishman and pseudo gentleman, yearns for nothing more uplifting than the good life. When he gets an assignment from the OAS (France's antigovernment secret army of the early 1960s) to do in Charles de Gaulle, he looks on it simply as a "once in a lifetime job." If he brings it off, he will be able to retire for good.

The Jackal is an outsider, unknown to the French security forces eventually unleashed against him. He begins the assignment in the reading room of the British Museum, boning up on De Gaulle's habits, and ends it--with a clutch of false papers and a hunting rifle disguised as an aluminum crutch--in a room on Paris' Rue de Rennes overlooking a liberation day ceremony.

Author Forsyth seems less efficient. In chronicling the plots and ploys of the Jackal and his enemies, he produces far too many shifts of focus, step-by-step itineraries and logistical minutiae. He inventories the furnishings of De Gaulle's office, and feels compelled to specify that the chauffeured, black Citroen DS 19s circle the courtyard of the Elysee Palace counterclockwise. But on such things as how to steal a passport or select an assassination site, his expertise is extraordinarily compelling.

The author knows too that the most grueling suspense is generated not by mystery but by a long, slow wait for the inevitable. Partly for this reason, he seems about to make the kind of killing (Book-of-the-Month Club, record paperback advance, vast movie contract, etc.) that the Jackal hoped for from his far grimmer enterprise.

Forsyth may be in the vanguard of a rather queasy-making literary trend. Readers do, inevitably, identify with the assassin, and what he has, briefly, in his telescopic sights is a heroic and honored chief of state. General de Gaulle is dead, of course. Earlier this year, though, Harper & Row issued Who Killed Enoch Powell?, a thriller-mystery predicated on the murder of a British Member of Parliament, notoriously disliked as a racist, but very much alive. What titles will come next? Ho, Sweet Homicide? Tell Them Willy Brandt Was Here? Sunset on the Pedernales?

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