AN UNWANTED MANUSCRIPT

For the whole of the spring and summer of 1970, I hawked the manuscript of The Day of the Jackal around the publishing houses of London, choosing my targets from Willings Press Guide. It actually went to four; three rejected it outright and I withdrew it from the fourth. But along the road, at least I learned what was wrong—apart from the fact that it might be a rotten novel.

The unsolicited manuscript is the bane of the publisher’s life. They arrive by the trolleyload: typed (in those days), handwritten, illegible, ungrammatical, unreasonable. There used to be a tradition in which on Monday mornings they were distributed among the junior readers for first assessment.

The junior reader was often a student or very recent arrival in-house and a long way down the pecking order. His or her job was to read it and provide a brief synopsis with a judgment, and that was what would go up to the next level of assessment. But no one high up the food chain would dream of reading anything other than an established author or possibly a very famous person who had put pen to paper.

The horror stories were the legends of publishing. Most authors, hailed as mega–best sellers, had had their first manuscript rejected over and over again; and it still goes on, because no one has the faintest idea who will be the next Ken Follett or John Grisham or J. K. Rowling.

Among authors, the nightmare stories that go the rounds concern the yearlong struggle to find anyone to publish their masterpiece. Among publishers, the horror takes are about those who turned down Harry Potter because who cares about a schoolboy wizard with a wand? And usually it is only the first chapter that is read anyway.

The Day of the Jackal had a major problem here because the first chapter is ridiculous. It purported to outline plans for the killing of a former French president who was very much alive, and everyone knew it. So the junior readers’ judgments probably said, “We know the climax already, the plan fails.” Manuscript returned.

Two of my rejections were simple printed forms. One was kind enough to write a letter. I wish I had retained and framed it, but I threw it away. It said the very idea would have “no reader interest.” Then I had yet another lucky break.

I was at a party and was introduced just socially to someone called Harold Harris. I had no idea who he was. Toward the end of the party, someone mentioned that he was the editorial director of Hutchinson, a major publisher.

I had already decided my solution might be to write a three-page synopsis of the plot, pointing out that the point of the story was not the death of de Gaulle, which clearly did not happen, but the manhunt as the assassin came closer and closer, eluding the huge machine ranged against him.

The following day, a Friday in September, I am afraid I ambushed Mr. Harris quite blatantly. I turned up at Hutchinson’s office in Great Portland Street and faced the usual screen of secretaries in place to keep unwanted wannabes away from the Presence behind the big door.

But I explained we were close friends and my call was social. I was allowed in. Harold Harris was puzzled until I pointed out we had met socially the previous evening. His perfect manners caused him not to summon the burly commissionaire, but to ask what he could do for me. I replied: I have a manuscript of a novel.

His eyes glazed over in horror, but I had got this far, so I plunged on.

“I know you have no time, so I will not take it up, Mr. Harris. Well, maybe five minutes, tops.”

With this, I advanced to his desk and placed the brief synopsis upon it.

“All I ask is that you glance at this and, if you think it is worthless, then chuck me out.”

Looking as if root canal surgery would be more welcome, he started to read. He finished the three pages and started again. He read it three times.

“Where is the manuscript now?” he asked.

I told him with which publisher it had lain for eight weeks. He stared pointedly at the ceiling.

“It is quite out of the question for a publisher to read a manuscript while a copy resides with another publisher,” he told me.

Asking him not to move, which he had no intention of doing, I was out of the office and down the stairs. I could not afford taxis, but I hailed one anyway and drove to the other publisher. It was the lunch hour. I could raise only the hall porter with my demand for my manuscript back, and he found a junior secretary on her sandwich break who retrieved my paper parcel from the reject pile and gave it back to me with a pitying smile. I returned to Great Portland Street and handed it over.

He read the whole thing over the weekend and rang on Monday morning.

“If you can be here at four this afternoon, with your agent, we can discuss a contract,” he said.

I had no agent, but I was there anyway. With my ignorance of publishing, royalties, and contracts, he could have skinned me alive. But he was an old-fashioned gentleman and gave me a fair document with an advance of five hundred pounds. Then he said:

“I am toying with the idea of offering you a three-novel contract. Do you have any other ideas?”

The thing about journalists is that they lie well. It comes from practice. It is also why they have great empathy with, or antagonism for, politicians and senior civil servants. Common territory.

“Mr. Harris, I am brimming with ideas,” I told him.

“Two synopses, one page each. By Friday noon,” he suggested.

Back on the street, I had a major problem. The story about the Jackal was supposed to be a one-off, something to tide me through a bad patch. I had not the slightest intention of becoming a novelist. So I tried to analyze the story that had been accepted and to recall what I knew about from personal experience and could use as background. I came up with two conclusions.

The Day of the Jackal was a manhunt story, and I knew a lot about Germany. While in East Berlin, I had heard about a mysterious organization of former Nazis who helped, protected, and warned each other in order never to have to face West German judicial hunters and answer for their crimes. It was called ODESSA, but I had thought it was part of the relentless East German propaganda against the Bonn government.

Perhaps not. Ten years earlier, the Israeli Mossad had hunted down Adolf Eichmann, living under a pseudonym outside Buenos Aires. Perhaps another hunt-down of a disappeared mass murderer?

And I knew about Africa and white mercenaries hired to fight in jungle wars. Perhaps a return to the rain forests, not to another civil war but to a mercenary-led coup d’état?

I wrote both down, as required, on a single sheet of A4 paper and presented them to Harold Harris that Friday. He skimmed through them and decided without a second’s hesitation.

“Nazis first, mercenaries second. And I want the first manuscript by December next year.”

I did not know at the time that he was Jewish, lapsed but from an Orthodox parentage. Nor that in April 1945 he had been a young German-speaking officer in British Army Intelligence. Nor that he had been summoned across Schleswig-Holstein to interrogate a mysterious but suspicious prisoner. He had not yet arrived in his jeep when the prisoner bit on a cyanide capsule and killed himself. That man was Heinrich Himmler.

I had one last problem before signing the three-novel contract. Apart from the coming five hundred pounds, I was still broke.

“There will be living costs and research and traveling and lodgings,” I said. “Could I have something to tide me through?”

He scrawled something on a sheet of paper and gave it to me.

“Take this to accounts,” he said. “Good luck and stay in touch. Oh, and get an agent. I recommend Diana Baring.”

The piece of paper I clutched was quite an act of faith. It was an authority to draw six thousand pounds against future royalties. In 1970, that was rather a lot of money.

Back on the street again, I started to think. Who the hell knows about Nazis? Then I recalled a book called The Scourge of the Swastika, which I had read years earlier. It was by Lord Russell of Liverpool, who had been a senior British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials during the forties. I would have to track him down and see if he could help.

Before then, I had yet another lucky break. I had met a man called John Mallinson, who prided himself on being an agent, albeit without clients. I did not look him up, but coincidentally we met again at the flat of a friend. I told him what had happened in Great Portland Street. He became quite excited.

“What about the film rights?” he asked. I had not a clue. He scoured the Hutchinson contract. “They’re still yours. Appoint me as your film agent and I’ll find a buyer.”

By November, he had done exactly that. The film deal was done with Romulus Films of Park Lane, headed by John Woolf. But his right-hand man in all things was John Rosenberg, and it was with him that we dealt. The offer was £17,500 plus a small percentage of net profits, or £20,000 outright sale in perpetuity.

Most people are good at some things and useless at others. I am pathetic at money. I had never seen £20,000, so I took it. I have no idea how many millions the film has made over the years. I can only excuse myself with the thought that I had no idea the book would sell over a hundred copies or the film would ever be made. Even the way it was made was a fluke.

That winter, the Hollywood giant Fred Zinnemann flew over to discuss a project with John Woolf. It was to film a successful play called Abelard and Heloise. There had always been a problem. The film could not be made while the play was onstage anywhere. That December, it closed in England and was not staging anywhere else.

The day before Zinnemann arrived, it was decided the play would reopen in a British provincial city. The Hollywood director’s trip was fruitless after all. Desperately embarrassed, John Woolf was apologizing in his office, knowing his guest had to face a rainy London weekend with nothing to read. Frantically, he reached for something John Rosenberg had placed on his desk.

“We have just bought this,” he said. Mr. Zinnemann took it and left. He was back on Monday. “This is my next movie,” he told a delighted Romulus Films.

I knew none of all this until later. As I look back, it was not really The Day of the Jackal, the one-off to clear my debts, that changed my life. It was Harold Harris and his three-novel contract. It just occurred to me that if I could make a good living dashing off this nonsense, why get my head blown off in an African rain ditch?

But the more immediate problem was trying to find Lord Russell of Liverpool to ask him about underground Nazis. And I had the problem of what to call them. I needed two titles. In German, ODESSA stood for Organization of Former Members of the SS. As far as the world was concerned, Odessa was a city in Ukraine or a town in Texas. Well, here was a third one. The Odessa File.

For the mercenaries I recalled a quote from Shakespeare. “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.” I had heard someone had used Cry Havoc, but not The Dogs of War. So I filched it from the Bard.