The Day of the Jackal and the Continental Op

So, what does my recent Algeria obsession, in the form of having just read Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, have to do with crime fiction, anyhow?

For one thing, it reinforces how strongly Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal, for all its thriller trappings, is really a police procedural that has marked affinities with hard-boiled P.I. stories as well (No wonder it won the best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972).

The villains of Forsyth's classic 1971 novel are the leaders of the OAS, the breakaway paramilitary organization that, enraged by French President Charles de Gaulle's concessions to Algeria, hires a hit man known as the Jackal to kill him. The OAS were (and perhaps still are) dissident military men who constituted themselves as a group in Francoist Spain, then turned self-destructive fanatics and terrorists both in Algeria and in France.

The OAS and their followers were a complex bunch, not least in that they explicitly adopted tactics and organization from their principal opponents, the Algerian FLN, or National Liberation Front. Some had fought in the French Resistance against Nazi Germany. Not all were racist. And there was ample anxiety, suspicion, and contempt on the anti-de Gaulle side between some in the OAS on the one hand, and the ultras among the civilian pieds noirs on the other.

Forsyth wisely sketches this background very lightly or not at all. Instead, after setting the stage with the story of a real-life plot against de Gaulle, he has a council of French ministers and other big shots bring in  Claude Lebel, "the best detective in France," and if that sounds like the leading citizens of a Wild West town desperately seeking a new sheriff — or like the Continental Op being called in to clean up Poisonville in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest — there's more to come.

Lebel is an ordinary cop, and his belittling by pompous, condescending, artistocratic ministers with whom he meets nightly is a running motif of The Day of the Jackal. This may remind readers readers of a thousand stories about P.I.s or cops who have trouble with authority. One passage near novel's end even calls Lebel "the little detective," which would also work as a description of Hammett's squat little Op.

On the plot side of things, Forsyth alternates sections describing the Jackal's maneuvers all over Europe, and the authorities' efforts to catch him. The idea, of course, is to build suspense by getting the reader wondering if the cops will get to the Jackal before the Jackal gets to de Gaulle, and the chapters devoted to the authorities are an exciting, convincing story of a criminal investigation, only in this case of a criminal who plans to kill the president of France.

(Hear Frederick Forsyth talk about The Day of the Jackal in an interview with the BBC.)

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A Savage War of Peace has one passage in particular that, whether or nor Alistair Horne intended so, may remind readers of a famous passage from Raymond Chandler. Take it away, Sir Alistair:

"Then, suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath. Men think, and behave, differently. It is a recurrent reminder that this is indeed Africa."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria in the '50 and the '90s: Yasmina Khadra and Alistair Horne

I'm still burrowing into the complicated history of France and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century via Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace,  In the meantime, here's an old post about an Algerian crime novel that paints a grim picture of the country a few decades after the events Horne recounts.

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Yasmina Khadra's novels about an Algiers police inspector named Brahim Llob owe much to the tradition of the alienated detective, but Khadra's wit is more bitter than is usual for that wisecracking tradition, and his target is his own country. Thus the opening pages of Dead Man's Share offer this:

"I try to catch the wall doing something wrong so I can investigate it."

but also

"We Algerians react only to what happens to us, never to forestall something that might happen to us.

"While waiting for the storm, we carry on with our rituals. Our patron saints take good care of us, our garbage cans are overflowing with food, and the planet's impending economic crisis is as distant as a comet—to us."

The novel's opening pages are full of bitter reflections on what Algeria does to its thinkers, how it consumes people of talent, how its leaders want to keep the people dumb. There may be a touch of autobiography to such passages; "Yasmina Khadra" is a pen name that the author, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul, adopted to avoid censorship when serving as an Algerian army officer. He now lives and writes in France.

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Dead Man's Share, published in French in 2004 as La part du mort and translated in 2009, is the fourth Brahim Llob novel. Khadra's comprehensive Web site (in French) includes excerpts, summaries, news, interviews, and the author's explanation of why he writes in French rather than Arabic.

A 2007 article surveys Khadra's work, including the Llob novels and non-series books that constitute a travelogue the Muslim world's miseries and agonies (The Attack, The Swallows of Kabul, The Sirens of Baghdad). And here are previous Detectives Beyond Borders posts about Khadra (click the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012, 2013

A savage war of reviews

My recent reading of The Day of the Jackal has led me to A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne's history of France's Algerian War.

The vast majority of the book’s free customer reviews on Amazon are five-star, but I was most interested in the two two-star reviews. Here's an excerpt from the first:

“Alistair Horne … is first and foremost hopelessly biased in favor of the Algerians.”

Here’s one from the second:

“This epic work … remains a remarkably racist work loved by State Department officials and neocons alike … Alistair Horne describes in gory detail atrocities committed by the FLN, or Algerian nationalist rebels, while skimming over far worse atrocities committed by the nice white-guy French.”

See also: Albert Camus, Yasmina Khadra, Rachid Taha

© Peter Rozovsky 2013