For the 1975 movie starring Clint Eastwood, see The Eiger Sanction (film)

The Eiger Sanction (film)

The Eiger Sanction is a 1975 American action thriller based on the novel The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian, a pseudonym for the American author, Dr. Rodney William Whitaker. The film was directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred as Dr. Jonathan Hemlock.-Plot:Dr...

.

The Eiger Sanction is a 1972 thriller novel by Rodney William Whitaker, written under the pseudonym Trevanian

Trevanian

Rodney William Whitaker was an American film scholar and writer who wrote several successful novels under the pen name Trevanian. Whitaker also published works as Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot and Edoard Moran...

. The story was made into a film

The Eiger Sanction (film)

The Eiger Sanction is a 1975 American action thriller based on the novel The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian, a pseudonym for the American author, Dr. Rodney William Whitaker. The film was directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred as Dr. Jonathan Hemlock.-Plot:Dr...

 directed by and starring Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood

Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...

 in 1975.

Whitaker wrote a sequel entitled The Loo Sanction.

Plot summary

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock is an art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

, lecturer

Lecturer

Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...

 and mountaineer

Mountaineer

-Sports:*Mountaineering, the sport, hobby or profession of walking, hiking, trekking and climbing up mountains, also known as alpinism-University athletic teams and mascots:*Appalachian State Mountaineers, the athletic teams of Appalachian State University...

. He is also a collector of paintings, most of them obtained from the black market. To finance his collection he works as an assassin

Assassination

To carry out an assassination is "to murder by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." Alternatively, assassination may be defined as "the act of deliberately killing someone, especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."An assassination may be...

 for a secret U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 government agency, the CII.

In order to acquire a Pissarro

Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...

, Hemlock agrees to carry out a couple of "sanctions" (contract assassinations). The first one is easily dealt with in Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

. For the second, he will need to join a group of climbers who are about to attempt the north face of the Eiger

Eiger

The Eiger is a mountain in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. It is the easternmost peak of a ridge crest that extends across the Mönch to the Jungfrau at 4,158 m...

, a particularly difficult challenge. Hemlock goes back into training and eventually climbs the mountain with the team that he believes includes his would-be victim — whose identity he will have to deduce on the mountain itself. Poor climbing conditions disrupt the climb, and lead Hemlock to the discovery that his target is someone other than he had expected.

See also

• Assassinations in fiction
  Assassinations in fiction
  Assassinations have formed a major plot element in various works of fiction and have also attracted scholarly attention. In Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture, Stephen Gundle and Lucia Rinaldi analyze modern Italian assassinations in their historical...
  
  
• Gore Vidal
  Gore Vidal
  Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
  
  , "The Top Ten Best Sellers According to the New York Times as of January 7, 1973." The New York Review of Books, May 17 and May 31, 1973.