The lost thrill of the thriller

I will not be joining in the praise heaped on the current Sky remake of Frederick Forsyth’s classic thriller The Day of the Jackal. Apart from the fact that the series’ star Eddie Redmayne – who plays the Jackal, an ice-cold hitman – is about as menacing as a field mouse, the new Jackal is very much a woke version of the story, complete with a far-right German Chancellor who is one of the Jackal’s victims.

Forsyth himself, a solidly right-wing Tory, seems to share my lukewarm opinion of the new adaptation of his masterpiece. He damned Redmayne with faint praise in a Times interview as a ‘nice young man’, hardly the encomium a ruthless killer would wish to have. Forsyth also admitted that his own role as an executive producer of the series amounted to taking a couple of phone calls, and pocketing the royalties.

For younger readers, I should explain that the original novel – based on Forsyth’s experience as a Reuters correspondent in Paris in the early 1960s – charted attempts to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle by right-wing terrorists. Those terrorists were out to avenge de Gaulle’s betrayal of French Algeria to the Arab nationalist FLN, who still misrule the country today.

Although we know that in reality de Gaulle survived, dying peacefully in his home in 1970 while watching the evening news, the tension in the novel and the 1973 film focuses on the police hunt for the Jackal as he prepares to kill his quarry, overcoming all obstacles. By the end, of course, such is Forsyth’s skill, that we are all rooting for this amoral sniper and hoping against hope that he gets his man.

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I should probably disclose that I sympathise with the OAS (as I suspect Forsyth does as well), the organisation of ex-soldiers and French pied-noir Algerians who hire the Jackal and came close to killing de Gaulle for real. I got to know the family of Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, who led the real-life ambush and attempted assassination of de Gaulle that opens the novel and film (he was shot by a Gaullist firing squad for his pains). As a patriotic Englishman, I detest the Anglophobe ingrate de Gaulle, whose bacon we saved in 1940 (although he was right to block our initial attempts to join the future EU).

But I digress: my point being that most contemporary thrillers are not thrilling at all. The novels of the absurdly overrated John le Carré, for example, are boringly complex yawnfests and – especially in the old boy’s twilight years – are fatally infected with his armchair socialism and querulous hatred of America.

I used to admire the ‘intelligent thrillers’ of Robert Harris, but his recent efforts – which have also been filmed – while still very readable, lack the cutting edge of the earlier ones. To thrill, stories need to have a danger of death (or at least serious harm) befalling their protagonists, but Harris’s Munich, for instance, which is about Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler at the 1938 conference, and stars Jeremy Irons as the PM in the film version, is as safe and predictable as a vicarage tea party. The book is little more than a vehicle for the author’s revisionist apologia for Chamberlain’s appeasement.

Similarly, Harris’s newly filmed Conclave – starring Ralph Fiennes – is about the election of a new Pope, but the novel’s surprise ending (in which a trans Pontiff emerges to defeat the conventional liberal and conservative favourites) is so patently ridiculous that it negates any ‘thrills’ we might feel. Harris’s Act of Oblivion (about the hunt for the regicides who executed Charles I) does not thrill either because we already know that in historical reality the two chief characters survived the royalists’ vengeful pursuit.

Harris’s latest, Precipice, convincingly portrays the political atmosphere in Britain on the cusp of joining the first world war, but there is never any danger of harm coming to the hero, and so we remain less than thrilled. Compare and contrast John Buchan’s classic Thirty Nine Steps, written and set in the same eve-of-war period, and repeatedly filmed, in which, hearts in our mouths, we join Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay as he is hunted through the Scottish heather by both the police and sinister German spies. Or better still, read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, published on the eve of world war two, in which a gentlemanly English assassin literally goes to ground in rural Dorset after taking a potshot at Hitler, again pursued by both the cops and sinister Nazi spies.

An unwelcome feature of the modern screen thriller is its unvarying wokeness. When terrorists are portrayed, they are always on the far right and never of the Islamist persuasion responsible for the vast majority of real terrorism in the contemporary world. Colour-blind casting is so ubiquitous that Henry VIII’s court is thronged with black courtiers in the Wolf Hall series, and on-screen villains are invariably stale, male and pale. Non-white characters are always portrayed sympathetically.

There are two notable exceptions to this sweeping condemnation of contemporary espionage fiction on page, screen and stage. The spy novels of the reliably excellent William Boyd contain all the thrills and spills that we could wish for, and the Slow Horses creation of Mick Herron (which have also hit the silver screen starring Gary Oldman, who also plays le Carré’s George Smiley character) are a startlingly original departure from the tedious le Carré tradition, while retaining all the seedy anti-glamour of the spook world. So there is still life to be found in the tired old thriller warhorse.

Around Christmas, the BBC still occasionally screen their superb 1970s adaptations of the masterly ghost stories of M. R. James, and the multi-talented Mark Gatiss has recently made his own screen homage to some of Monty’s scholarly chillers. James (who himself kept an admirably open mind about the existence of ghosts) conjures up bone-chilling and genuinely frightening tales from the seemingly harmless world of cathedral closes, seaside hotels, and Cambridge colleges, and is a minor master in the canon of English literature. The same skill set is evident in the haunting and deservedly popular spooky stories of Susan Hill, such as her Woman in Black. So the thriller, in the right hands, lives on like an immortal vampire.