The leopard

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Leopard is a spy thriller directed by Ken Follett . Under the title Jackdaws , the book was first published in 2001 by Macmillan Verlag, London, in English. In Germany the novel is published by Bastei-Verlag . The German first edition was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 2 weeks in 2002 .

content

The novel is set during the Second World War in the ten days before D-Day (June 6, 1944). The locations are France and England.

The British Special Operations Executive (SOE), together with the French Resistance , is trying to destroy one of the most important telecommunications centers of the German occupiers near Reims . After a first attack failed and the majority of the SOE agents were shot, the protagonist and leader, the experienced SOE agent Major Felicity "Flick" Clairet, whose code name is Leopard , returns to England and within a very short time provides a command unit for a second try together. In order to be able to break into the building camouflaged as a cleaning crew, she needs a group of French-speaking women with as little accent as possible and knowledge of telecommunications, weapons and explosives. Flick is forced to fall back on women who were classified as unsuitable by the secret service in their first applications. The 6-person all- women group is given the code name Die Dohlen (English Jackdaws) and after crash training jumps over France by parachute.

As a sniper, Flick hires her childhood friend Baroness Diana Colefield, who is presented as a successful hunter who, however, has problems with military discipline because of her noble origins. Diana begins an affair with the naive member of the group, Maude Valentine, with whom she is ultimately caught at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. Ruby Romain, on the other hand, who is in prison on a murder charge, is the only jackdaw to return alive from France alongside Flick. It is considered determined and brutal. After successfully installing explosives, Flick frees her from interim Gestapo imprisonment, but the explosives expert Geraldine "Jelly" Knight, a 40-year-old former safe-breaker, is killed. "Greta Garbo", a homosexual transvestite who grew up in Hamburg and who was the telecommunications technician who was a specialist in paralyzing the German communications system, died in the explosion in the telecommunications center.

Parallel to the story of Flick and the Jackdaws , the novel reports on the efforts of the German major Dieter Franck from the staff of General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel , who is constantly on Flick's track because, as a successful agent, she has numerous contacts with the Resistance and Franck on this basis intends to crush internal French resistance before an Allied landing operation in France. Franck, who was a criminal investigator in Cologne until 1940, is a keenly combining and emotionally cold interrogation specialist who uses various torture methods to extract information from his prisoners , with the help of which he forges one plan after another to capture the female leopard . Despite his wife and two children, he has a French lover whom he saved from deportation, but who is shot by Flick during the course of the operation.

When Flick and Ruby want to flee France after successfully sabotaging the telecommunications center with the help of the US officer Paul Chancellor, who heads the operation and who falls in love with Flick and with whom Flick also falls in love before the operation, Franck sets one last trap for them . Both Flick's husband Michel Clairet, the leader of the resistance group Bollinger (English Boulanger), as well as his lover and Franck's adjutant die before Flick can prevail in a duel against Franck and safely returns to England.

Publications

In addition to the German-language translations, the following were published:

  • Le Réseau Corneille in French published by Robert Laffont
  • Le Gazze Ladre in Italian published by Mondadori
  • Alto Riesgo in Spanish by Random House Mondadori

The novel is also available as an audio book of the same name, consisting of 6 CDs and a playing time of 444 minutes.

literature