Latest news with #Jackal
Time of India
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
From The Day of the Jackal to Avenger: The essential guide to reading Frederick Forsyth
On June 9, 2025, Frederick Forsyth passed away at the age of 85. Quietly, with the elegance of a final page turned. For the casual reader, he was the man behind The Day of the Jackal. For those who understood the cold mechanics of statecraft, subterfuge, and revenge, he was something else entirely: the godfather of the modern political thriller. Forsyth didn't just tell stories. He created operations. His books were briefing documents disguised as fiction. And his protagonists—dispassionate, precise, unshakeable—weren't the stuff of fantasy. They were men who could plausibly exist, probably did, and might even have worked next to you in a government office, quietly plotting the fate of nations. Here is your essential reading guide. Less a memorial, more a manual. The Day of the Jackal (1971) It begins here. A nameless assassin is hired to kill Charles de Gaulle. We know from history that the attempt fails. Yet Forsyth somehow builds unbearable suspense—not around what will happen, but how close it might come. Written in just over a month after Forsyth left the BBC in disgust, the novel introduced a new form: the procedural thriller, grounded in research, logistics, and icy plausibility. The Jackal doesn't just kill. He assembles forged papers, tests custom-made rifles, plots escape routes. The excitement is not in car chases—it's in watching a plan unfold, bolt by bolt. The biggest success, the novel spawned two movies and one show, the latest starring Eddie Redmayne as the Jackal. The Odessa File (1972) A young German journalist stumbles upon the hidden postwar network of ODESSA—ex-SS officers shielding one another, thriving under false names. This is a thriller steeped in moral consequence, tracing a nation's suppressed guilt. It's also one of Forsyth's most emotionally charged works, built around real testimony and Wiesenthal-inspired justice. The Dogs of War (1974) A British tycoon hires mercenaries to stage a coup in the fictional African nation of Zangaro. The motive? Platinum. The method? Painstaking military precision. This isn't an action novel. It's an instruction manual for corporate-backed regime change. Forsyth researched arms dealers, charter flights, smuggling routes. So much so that the book was reportedly studied by actual mercenaries—and banned in parts of Africa. Icon (1996) Set in the then-future year of 1999, Icon imagines Russia on the brink. A slick nationalist candidate, Igor Komarov, is about to win the presidency. On the surface, he's Western-friendly. Behind the curtain is The Komarov Plan—a secret manifesto calling for ethnic cleansing, authoritarian rule, and imperial resurgence. Jason Monk, a former CIA operative and Cold War hand, is pulled back into the game. His mission: stop Komarov before democracy is dismantled and Europe is destabilised. What follows is Forsyth's sharpest political novel—a Cold War hangover laced with chilling foresight. Written before Putin's rise, it now reads like prophecy. Avenger (2003) Calvin Dexter is a quiet New Jersey lawyer. He pays his taxes, goes for jogs, and takes on routine cases. But at night, he is something else: a private avenger. When the legal system fails to bring war criminals to justice, Dexter tracks them down and delivers them to the courts—alive, if not unharmed. When an American aid worker is killed by a Bosnian warlord, Dexter is contracted to retrieve the killer from his luxurious hideout in Latin America. But there's a problem—the CIA is protecting that same man, hoping to use him in a broader counterterrorism mission. Forsyth's brilliance here lies not in explosions, but in the collision between moral clarity and national expedience. Dexter is not a rebel. He's a methodical, lethal bureaucrat. In many ways, the most Forsythian of all Forsyth characters. The Fourth Protocol (1984) A Soviet nuclear plot. A secret delivery mechanism. A British election that could tip the balance. This is Forsyth's Cold War masterclass, tying together Labour Party intrigue, KGB operations, and MI5's internal battles. The stakes are nuclear, but the tension lies in the slow, intelligent unravelling of the plot. Less a bombastic thriller, more a patient, precise game of spy chess. The Fist of God (1994) The Gulf War, reimagined with Forsyth's usual dose of uncomfortably plausible fiction. Here, Saddam Hussein's regime is hiding a secret weapon. The West suspects. Israel acts. Covert operatives are embedded. And one man must expose the truth before catastrophe strikes. Drawn from military intelligence, real battlefield reports, and interviews with insiders, it blurs the line between what happened and what nearly did. The Afghan (2006) A veteran British soldier goes undercover inside al-Qaeda. His mission: impersonate a prisoner, gather intelligence, and stop a terrorist operation codenamed Al-Isra. Less elegant than his earlier work, but notable for adapting Forsyth's deep operational style to post-9/11 asymmetrical warfare. The bureaucracy of terror meets the bureaucracy of the West. The Fox (2018) An elderly British intelligence chief recruits a teenage autistic savant who can hack into Pentagon-level systems. What unfolds is a cybersecurity thriller with old-school MI6 bones. This was Forsyth's final novel, and while it leans into modern threats, it's still firmly rooted in the values of Cold War craftsmanship. A quiet, fitting coda. The Outsider (2015) Forsyth's memoir is not a celebrity confessional—it's a debrief. He writes of his time as a fighter pilot, his disillusionment with journalism during Biafra, and his covert work for MI6. He describes his writing method with the same precision as his fictional operatives. You finish the book understanding that Frederick Forsyth didn't write thrillers. He lived them. Then redacted just enough to publish. Why Forsyth still matters Over 70 million books sold Translated into more than 30 languages Inspired an entire generation of writers—Tom Clancy, Daniel Silva, Robert Ludlum Pioneered a new subgenre: the procedural geopolitical thriller Forecasted themes that now dominate world affairs—cybersecurity, populism, privatised warfare, surveillance states Forsyth's gift wasn't drama—it was control. He made the reader believe that if you knew enough, you could predict everything. That evil wasn't loud or flamboyant—it was efficient, well-dressed, and carrying diplomatic papers. His heroes never shouted. They filed. And then they acted. In a world obsessed with chaos, Frederick Forsyth gave us order. Cold, unflinching, and deeply necessary. One step to a healthier you—join Times Health+ Yoga and feel the change
The Guardian
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Frederick Forsyth obituary
Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and 'bashed out' The Day of the Jackal, he 'never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist'. Forsyth, who has died aged 86, also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain's armed forces, but it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered. Forsyth's manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher's sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle – an event that everyone knew did not happen. The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal – an anonymous English assassin – almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader's sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim. It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers' of America Edgar award for best first novel, attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits – he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was 'pathetic at money'. The 1972 paperback edition of The Day of the Jackal was reprinted 33 times in 18 years and is still in print, but while readers were happy to be taken in by Forsyth's painstakingly researched details (about everything from faked passports to assembling a sniper's rifle), the critics and the crime-writing establishment were far from impressed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Spy and Suspense Stories, published in 1982, by which time Forsyth's sales were well into the millions, declared rather loftily that 'authenticity is to Forsyth what imagination is to many other writers', and the critic Julian Symons dismissed Forsyth as having 'no pretension to anything more than journalistic expertise'. It was a formula that readers clearly approved of, with the subsequent novels in that original three-book deal, The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974), being both bestsellers and successful films. Novellas, collections of short stories and more novels were to follow. These included The Fourth Protocol (1984), which had a cameo role for the British spy-in-exile Kim Philby and was also successfully filmed, with a screenplay by Forsyth and starring Michael Caine and a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and, against type, The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), a sequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Nothing, however, was to match the impact of The Day of the Jackal and when a Guardian journalist spotted a copy in a London flat used by the world's most wanted terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or 'Carlos', in 1975, the British press dubbed him Carlos the Jackal, with no need to explain the reference. Born in Ashford, Kent, Frederick was the son of Phyllis and Frederick Sr, shopkeepers at 4 North Street – his mother's dress business operated on the ground floor and his father sold furs on the first floor. He was educated at Tonbridge school, where supportive teachers and summer holidays abroad ensured that Frederick excelled at French, German and Russian. At the age of 16, he enrolled on an RAF flying scholarship course that brought him a pilot's licence by the age of 17 and eased his way into the RAF proper for his national service, where he obtained his pilot's 'wings' and flew Vampire jets as the youngest pilot in the service. However, when he failed in his ambition to be posted to a frontline squadron, he opted for a change of career and in 1958 entered journalism as a trainee with the Eastern Daily Press in their King's Lynn office. In the autumn of 1961 he set his sights on Fleet Street, and his fluency with languages (which now included Spanish) got him a job with Reuters press agency. In May 1962, he was posted to Reuters' office in Paris, where De Gaulle was the target of numerous assassination attempts by disaffected Algerians. The experience was not lost on Forsyth, but before he could put it to good use in The Day of the Jackal, there were other journalistic postings, a war to survive and a non-fiction book to write. The Reuters' office in East Berlin was a plum posting for any journalist in 1963 as the cold war turned distinctly chilly, despite the attentions of the East German security services. However, when he returned to Britain in 1965 for a job as a diplomatic correspondent with the BBC, it was Broadcasting House rather than East Berlin which he found to be 'a nest of vipers'. Forsyth's relationship with the BBC hierarchy was antagonistic from the start and deteriorated rapidly when he was sent to Nigeria in 1967 to cover the civil war then unravelling. Objecting to the unquestioning acceptance of Nigerian communiques that downplayed the situation, by both the Foreign Office and the BBC, Forsyth began to file stories putting the secessionist Biafran side of the story as well as the developing humanitarian crisis. He was recalled to London for an official BBC reprimand but returned to Nigeria as a freelance at his own expense to cover the increasingly bloody war and to write a Penguin special, The Biafra Story (1969). He returned to Britain for Christmas 1969, low on funds, his BBC career in tatters and with nowhere to live. On 2 January 1970, camped out in the flat of a friend, he began to write a novel on a battered portable typewriter. After 35 days The Day of the Jackal was finished, and fame and fortune followed. In 1973 he married Carrie (Carole) Cunningham, and they moved to Spain to avoid the rates of income tax likely to be introduced by an incoming Labour government. In 1974 they relocated to County Wicklow in Ireland, where writers and artists were treated gently when it came to tax, returning to Britain in 1980 once Margaret Thatcher was firmly established in Downing Street. By 1990, Forsyth had undergone an amicable divorce from Carrie, but a far less amicable separation from his investment broker and his life savings, and claimed to have lost more than £2m in a share fraud. To recoup his losses, Forsyth threw himself into writing fiction, producing another string of bestsellers, although none had the impact of his first three novels. He was appointed CBE in 1997 and received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2012. In 2016 he announced that he would write no more thrillers and that his memoir The Outsider (2015), which revealed that he had worked as an unpaid courier for MI6, or 'The Firm' as he called it, would be his swansong. He acquired a reputation as a rather pungent pundit, both on Radio 4 and in a column in the Daily Express, when it came to such topics as the 'offensive' European Union, the leadership of the Conservative party, the state of Britain's prisons and jihadist volunteers returning from Middle Eastern conflicts. He was an active campaigner on behalf of Sgt Alexander Blackman, 'Marine A', who was jailed for the murder of an injured Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011. Forsyth maintained that Blackman had been made a scapegoat by the army from the moment of his court martial. In 2017 the conviction was overturned. Often concerned with military charities, Forsyth wrote the lyrics to Fallen Soldier, a lament for military casualties in all wars recorded and released in 2016. Forsyth was not the first foreign correspondent to take up thriller-writing. Ian Fleming had led the way in the 1950s, with Alan Williams and Derek Lambert carrying the torch into the 1960s. The spectacular success of The Day of the Jackal did however encourage a new generation, among them the ITN reporter Gerald Seymour, whose debut novel, Harry's Game, was generously reviewed by Forsyth in the Sunday Express in 1975. Years later, Seymour remembered the impact of Forsyth's debut, The Day of the Jackal: 'That really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller.' Despite having declared Forsyth's retirement from fiction, his publisher Bantam announced the appearance of an 18th novel, The Fox, in 2018. Based on real-life cases of young British hackers, The Fox centres on an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger syndrome and the ability to access the computers of government security and defence systems. For Christmas 1973 Disney based the short film The Shepherd, a ghostly evocation of second world war airfields, on a 1975 short story by Forsyth. The following year The Day of the Jackal was reimagined by Ronan Bennett for a TV series with Eddie Redmayne taking the place of Fox. Later this year a sequel to The Odessa File, Revenge of Odessa, written with Tony Kent, is due to appear. Forsyth will be a subject of the BBC TV documentary series In My Own Words. In 1994 he married Sandy Molloy. She died last year. He is survived by his two sons, Stuart and Shane, from his first marriage. Frederick Forsyth, journalist and thriller writer, born 25 August 1938; died 9 June 2025
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
One Shot: ‘The Day of the Jackal' set its sights on a killer with a special eyepiece
Eddie Redmayne is a sharpshooting assassin in Peacock's suspense thriller 'The Day of the Jackal,' a series whose visual language is as sleek as its chameleon-like protagonist. 'He's an enigmatic man of mystery who tries to do his work with the minimum amount of attention,' says cinematographer Christopher Ross, who lensed the first three episodes with director Brian Kirk. 'The camera is almost always moving. It has inertia to it, the idea being that there's an inevitability to the character's actions.' Propelling the stirring story is a chilling sequence where the marksman has his sights on a target 3,815 meters (2.37 miles) away, an unprecedented distance for a successful hit. 'The philosophy of the sequence is that he needs to prepare himself physically, emotionally and psychologically for this assassination,' notes Ross. In contextualizing the visceral action, the cinematographer isolated the character from the stark environment, illustrating his hyperfocused, meticulous nature as the hair-raising tension builds. The camera slowly pushes down the barrel of the gun like a ticking clock striking zero. Magnifying the Jackal's unflinching eye is a bespoke telescopic eyepiece that peers into the soul of the killer seconds before he pulls the trigger. And the Jackal doesn't miss.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How ‘The Day of the Jackal' producers unlocked their contemporary adaptation of the spy thriller
Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant had long wanted to adapt Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal, which had already been turned into a 1973 film directed by Fred Zinneman and starring Edward Fox. But they had always tabled the discussion because "I don't think think the film can be bettered," Neame tells Gold Derby. "Several rounds we just said, 'No, we're not gonna do anything with this. We're not gonna pursue it,'" he continues. More from GoldDerby 'Andor' creator Tony Gilroy on the show's greater impact on the 'Star Wars' universe and how much K-2SO is enough That shocking 'The Last of Us' death, final seasons for 'The Boys' and 'Cobra Kai,' and more from Sony TV actors and showrunners 'I know this dude!': David Alan Grier explains why he leapt at the chance to play a 'burned-out' doctor on 'St. Denis Medical' But the producing duo could never forget about it and eventually found a way to put their own spin on the spy thriller: by bringing the cat-and-mouse chase into the 21st century as a 10-episode TV series to delve deeper into the psyche of the titular assassin. And it worked. The Day of the Jackal has been a hit for Peacock and Sky and was renewed for a second season before the first one ended. Eddie Redmayne stars as the Jackal, who's being pursued by MI6 agent Bianca Lawson (Lashana Lynch). As part of their update, the show flips the ending of the film, in which the Jackal is killed. Redmayne's Jackal survives, kills Bianca, and the season ends with him in pursuit of an unpaid debt for his last kill, and his wife Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and their son, who had just left him. Below, Neame and Marchant explain their creative breakthrough, casting Redmayne, and if there was ever a thought of having a new Jackal every season. Gold Derby: I know you guys have wanted to adapt the book for a while and you finally landed on this iteration, which includes changing parts of the ending. How did you guys get to this place? Gareth Neame: We were aware that we had access to this property because we're Universal and they made the Zinneman movie, but we weren't really very interested in a remake because I don't think the film can be bettered. We loved the the original. We also really admired the Frederick Forsyth novel. So we did spend quite a lot of time thinking about it actually. Several rounds we just said, "No, we're not gonna do anything with this. We're not gonna pursue it." But we couldn't stop thinking about it. And then we thought, "Well, OK, we're not gonna remake it, but why don't let's contemporize it." Then we thought about the dramatic differences between a book and a standalone movie, and of course all the strengths of episodic television and how that is such a different dramatic form, and it would allow us to tell actually quite a different story, but using the major kind of foundations of it. So the English assassin, the cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, the high-profile target, and a lot of other sort of specific elements within the book which we were able to take. But of course, a huge amount of it was new invention by our writer Ronan Bennett, and there's a whole swath of of new material in, in our version. And then things like the ending we wanted to change obviously. We're making an episodic show here, so that that dictated for practical reasons a different ending, but also we just wanted to do something differently. We changed the gender of the of the pursuer, which makes the makes the show feel much more balanced and more contemporary. Was your your intention when you decided to turn it into a show to always have it run multiple seasons because it could have been a limited series, just one and done? Nigel Marchant: Yeah, we could have done it that way, but I think again, leaning into long-form television and the opportunity that that presents itself, is really painting a story on a bigger canvas. The Jackal couldn't be a ghost over long-form. In a two-hour movie, he can be. So we had to show another side to him, and that's why we brought out his family and his home life and the balancing acts he tries to do. So I think it's really just leaning into long-form television that that makes it an exciting proposition to us and to an audience hopefully. I love that he survived because I think over the course of the season, everyone just kind of fell in love with him, even though they shouldn't. Neame: That just the appeal, isn't it, of storytelling when you have these antiheroes that you don't quite understand what it is about their makeup that that you actually find attractive. And it's a really curious thing what this kind of storytelling can do with our own moral compass. Marchant: I think that's the joy of the the original movie and book that you're sat there rooting for the Jackal. And then it's a slap in the face every now and then when you you realize he is an assassin, or what he does and, and it brings you up with a short jolt that you're, in effect, rooting for the wrong person. SEE How Eddie Redmayne crafted his 'deeply unflappable' assassin on The Day of the Jackal Was there a thought of killing him and but just having a new Jackal in Season 2? The renewal was announced before the finale aired, and I think some people's thinking was like, "Oh, they'll kill off the Jackal and there'll be a new Jackal in Season 2." Neame: It would have been a way to go, but I think what we're trying to do is to say, "This really is the best person in the world of what he does." And so the idea that somebody else would be introduced who would be as good, I think, as Nigel says, with series television that you want to root for that actor in that role. The ending in the movie is a full closure. It's a movie, and we're making series television. The appeal of series television is more and more episodes, and ideally, I think character is actually more important than plot. So knowing that character and the actor who plays him, I think, is an important thing to take us forward into the next season. Marchant: Yeah, and Eddie being so good in that role as well. Why would you not carry on? And there felt plenty more we could explore with that character and his journey. Eddie is incredible in this, and I think his performance has surprised a lot of people, even though we've been watching him for so long. I think people are not used to seeing this play this cool, steely assassin. Neame: He was, a couple years ago, in The Good Nurse, where he played a very sinister character, and we were definitely watching that at the around the time that we offered him this part. It wasn't really that [film], but the reason why we were interested in him is we definitely wanted to lean into the Englishness. We wanted to honor the original Edward Fox performance in the original movie, and kind of think, "Who is this subsequent generation that people who revere the original film would sort of feel that our Jackal was a sort of descendant of the original?" So we wanted a very English actor, but obviously we wanted a star who had very big profile. And Eddie does that. He's also wears the clothes well, which is what Edward Fox did as well at that time, very suave, very Savile Row, public school English. We didn't know Eddie, but obviously we've seen all his performances, and the thing that they all seem to have in common is this kind of meticulous preparation physicality. You know, they're all all the roles look like. They're very chewy, roles that he's that he's attracted to, do things that he has to prepare for. And we knew that was the case here because it involved all the prosthetic work, the disguises, the new languages, he had to learn the action movement, you know, we thought, and and, of course, learning all the trade craft with the guns and this kind of we thought we didn't know him, but we, you know, he thought, I suspect he's going to find this really intriguing. And he responded to us very, very quickly when we sent the script. So we have a hunch he was probably been contemplating, because he obviously hasn't been in a TV series. And he responded to us very, very quickly when we sent the script. So we have a hunch he was probably been contemplating — because he obviously hasn't been in a TV series. He did some limited series kind of near the start of his career, but he's been otherwise exclusively a features actor. So I think, like many film actors in the last decade, they're increasingly thinking about television, and I think he probably has been looking for the right project. And then he read this, and thought, "This could be it." We discovered was a big fan of the original film. Yeah, and it's his dad's favorite. So much of his performance and the show is about stillness and patience. I talked to Eddie and he said you all really wanted the show to be about the craft work and weren't worried about drawing out long scenes. What were those discussions like? Neame: Yeah, absolutely right. Because the book, it's very technical. They're a whole chapter. They're not very long chapters. But there's a whole chapter about forging a passport, and there's a whole chapter about him saying what sort of gun he needs. We couldn't do a hit of the week. There's a target right at the beginning, which is kind of the old job that he doesn't get paid for. And then there's a new job, and that's got to span the 10 hours. We did not want to do [a hit] every week. That sound that feels a bit kind of 1980s, you need it needed to have a certain kind of rhythm if there was going to just be this one hit across the [season]. I mean, obviously there's a lot of collateral damage in the show beyond the the target, but you're right about that stillness. That's why Ronan introduced — not in the book — the idea of the birdwatcher, and that somebody who was able to and enjoyed sitting there for five hours waiting to find this one bird that he's looking for would have that sense of patience. Speaking of collateral damage, in the finale, he kills this elderly couple, Trevor (Philip Jackson) and Liz (Michelle Newell), and I feel like he regrets that kill the most. He had promised them he wasn't going to kill them, and he also said they remind him of his parents. Between this and the Nuria plotline, do you think the Jackal is just a family guy at heart, or at least is envious of a normal life? Neame: I think what you see is his meticulous planning in the early episodes starts to become, obviously, more and more frayed. I think it's only when he kills this old couple that, you know, he says, before he kills them, "Why?" When she stabs him, he says, "Why did you have to do that? The two of you were going to walk away from here with your lives." I think he kind of breaks down at that moment because he realizes he's a professional, and he kills people, but he does not want to randomly kill innocent people. And although there is collateral damage, there are other moments where, across the show, you see where he avoids killing people. Marchant: I think also there's that kind of misconception at the beginning with the Jackal that he thinks he can keep these two different parts of his life completely separate. And I think throughout the show, we see how they merge on each other. So by the end, the wheels have really come off, as Gareth said. It's just he's having to do things he wouldn't want to do in a normal world. The meticulous planning that has gone on before, now he can't do, and he just needs to escape. [With Nuria] I think we kind of wanted, always, for the audience to be on the fence, "Was this just a cover for him? Does he really love her?" And that's part of the journey that we go on in that first season. And then at the end of the season, we're left asking the question, "Would she ever go back to him, even if he found her and and again? That's what we can look to explore in future seasons. Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited She doesn't leave him until the very end, and it feels like she she only made the decision to leave him because she felt like she and their kid were in danger. Marchant: I think that's absolutely right. I love the shot of the Jackal and Bianca in the two-way mirror in the finale. They are the mirror image of each other. How did that come about? Marchant: That really Anu [Menon], who was our director on that last block and wanted that shot. And I think again, we kind of tempted the audience for such a while of these two different characters coming together and the near-misses. And so finally, when we get there, they are two faces of the same coin. They've got so much more in common than you think. And both have done some terrible things along our journey of the first season, sometimes in the pursuit of good, but they are that kind of mirror image of each other. And she brought that visual visually alive for us. At the end, we learn that Bianca had texted Halcrow (Chukwudi Iwuji) that Isabel (Lia Williams) had sent her after the Jackal. What do you think it says about her that she's willing to go even when she suspects something might be amiss with Isabel? Neame: She knows she's been on this pursuit, but she cannot stop herself from trying to her target. It's beautifully, sort of morally complex that she's been sent there by Isabel and given the OK to go ahead with that mission that she knows she's in danger. But I think she feels that they are equally matched, and that she will get him. Marchant: I absolutely think [Bianca suspects Isabel], and that's why she sends the text that there's a kind of level of insurance there, or certainly lead somebody else to look at what had gone on. What can you share about Season 2? Marchant: We leave [Season 1] with two big kind of questions in terms of tracking Nuria and seeking revenge. So that's the starting point, I would say, of the next season. Neame: He's lost everything. He's lost her, but he's also lost not only a home, but in his home, he's got a whole kind of headquarters of his tools of his trade. He's lost everything, so we're going to have to think see him kind of rebuild from where we left him. In Season 1, we got the Afghanistan flashback. Will you tease out more of his backstory in Season 2? Neame: It's a very incomplete story. What we do know is how he moved from serving as military soldier in the armed forces with a particular expertise [and] got drawn into this kind of starting to become commercial assassins and not just military snipers. But that's really the only bit, and I suppose a bit of the backstory of how he and Nuria get together, but I think there's still a lot more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to reveal. Season 1 of The Day of the Jackal is streaming on Peacock. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 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Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Victorian scam artist who duped an island
Hiding her true identity behind more than 40 aliases, con artist Annie Gordon Baillie made a living swindling shopkeepers across Victorian Britain. But in the 1880s, the Scottish fraudster took her criminal activities to a new level. She arrived on Skye during the Crofters' War, a violent clash between tenant farmers and landowners over land rights. Posing as an aristocratic novelist, she saw an opportunity to make a fortune - by convincing 1,000 islanders to relocate to a patch of Australian swamp. Annie's story is told in a new series of BBC Radio 4's Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley. The episode draws on newspaper articles, court reports and a book called The Adventures of a Victorian Con Woman: The Life and Crimes of Mrs Gordon Baillie by Mick Davis and David Lassman. Annie was born into poverty in Peterhead, a fishing port in Aberdeenshire, in February 1848. By her 20s, she was defrauding shopkeepers and running up credit for goods she had no intention of paying for. In the 1870s, Annie became more ambitious and set up a fake charity to establish a Protestant school for girls in Rome - a heartland of the Catholic faith. Donations poured in but the school was never built. "The law catches up with her briefly in 1872 and she spends nine months in prison for fraud," said historian Worsley. Following her release from prison, Annie had a whirlwind few years. She married an opera singer and the couple had three children. The family spent some time in New York. But in November 1884, she turned up on the Isle of Skye "wearing fancy clothes and jewels," according to Worsley. "She passes herself off as a wealthy literary lady, who is writing a novel about the plight of the crofters of Skye," she added. Skye, along with other west coast island communities, was in the grip of the Crofters' War. Waged throughout much of the 1800s, it was a dispute between landowners and communities of tenant farmers distressed by high rents, their lack of rights to land, and eviction threats to make way for large-scale farming operations. The process of moving families out of inland areas where they had raised cattle for generations to coastal fringes of large estates, or abroad to territories in Canada, had started with the Highland Clearances in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. Both the clearances and the Crofters' War were marked by violent clashes between people facing eviction and landowners and the authorities. One of the bloodiest incidents was the Battle of the Braes on Skye in 1882. After being attacked with stones by a crowd of men and women, about 50 police officers from Glasgow baton-charged the mob. The unrest spread to Glendale in Skye and in 1883 the frustrated authorities called for military intervention to help round up the ring-leaders. In early 1883, the iron-hulled Royal Navy gunboat Jackal appeared in Loch Pooltiel, off Glendale. Marines disembarked from the Jackal and landed at Glendale's Meanish Pier to help police in making arrests. Newspapers sent reporters to cover the dispute's twists and turns, so Annie was well versed on the "war", and any opportunity to benefit for it. Philanthropy was all the rage among wealthy Victorians, and Annie tapped into that. Posing as a "lady novelist", she told Skye's crofters she would fundraise for their cause. Annie did an interview on her "charity work" with the Aberdeen Evening News, turning up at a hotel in Portree in a striking crimson dressing gown and fingers adorned with jewelled rings. Scottish historical and crime writer Denise Mina said the disguise distracted people from what Annie was really up to. "She had a great eye for an emotive cause," Mina said. "Physically, how would I describe her? She's very pretty, very petite and always well turned out." But Mina added: "She is taking money from crofters who are just about to go to war because they have been run off their land and burned out of their homes. "She is going to raise money and leg it with the dosh. "It is quite spiteful what she is doing, but it is all wrapped up in this lady façade." More stories from the Highlands and Islands News from the Highlands and Islands on BBC Sounds Annie's scam took a bizarre turn when she suggested the islanders quit Skye and emigrate to Australia. She even travelled out to Australia to negotiate a deal for land as a new home. In Melbourne, she was shown an unwanted area of marshy ground. Annie said 1,000 crofters could relocate there, and give up farming and become fishermen instead. But Mina said: "The whole point is the crofters don't want to leave - that's the whole dispute." The deal collapsed and Annie returned to London where more trouble awaited her. Publicity around her scheme had caught the attention of a Scotland Yard detective - Det Insp Henry Marshall - who had long been on the trail of Annie and her shopkeeper frauds across London. She was arrested in 1888, leaving crofters on Skye still waiting for their "golden ticket" to a new life in Australia. Annie was later jailed for five years for swindling the shopkeepers. The money involved in the frauds was believed to be far less than the true amount of Annie's ill-gotten gains over the years. After her release, she was soon back in jail - this time for stealing paintings. Once released from prison, she emigrated to New York where in 1902 there is a record of her being placed in a workhouse as punishment for vagrancy. And then she vanishes without a trace. Lady Swindlers' in-house historian, Prof Rosalind Crone, said Annie's story exposed the "dark side" of charitable giving in Victorian times. "It wasn't always about helping the unfortunate or supporting worthwhile causes," she added. For crofters, the war led to a public inquiry and eventually legislation that protected their land rights - and hopefully any chance of ever being scammed by phoney lady novelists again. The fake heiress who was obsessed with Scotland Memorial to recall crofters' uprising
