Bashed out in just 35 days on a knackered old typewriter sporting a bullet hole from his days as a war reporter, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day Of The Jackal — 50 years old this month — changed thriller writing for ever. It didn’t matter that everyone knew the ending before they read it; set in the early 1960s, the plot revolves around a professional assassin’s attempt to kill Charles de Gaulle. But the former French president had died at home several months earlier in November 1970. Nor did it matter that Forsyth’s first novel reads more like a documentary than fiction. Or that it became the go-to manual for an alarming number of real-life hitmen.