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The Day of the Jackal,
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Mike MacDee
No...not entirely. The events preceding the plot -- Algerian liberation and the OAS, the several failed assassination attempts against De Galle, and the execution of Bastien-Thiry -- is indeed based in historical fact. The story of the Jackal's assassination attempt is fiction, but it's written in the dry, objective, and highly detailed style of investigative journalism so it almost feels like you're reading a real government report. Also, later, a real assassin adopted the name "Jackal", which led to confusion about whether the book was about him.
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