19 Facts About Richard Condon

Richard Thomas Condon was an American political novelist.

Richard Condon raged at Western civilization and every last one of its works.

Richard Condon decorticated the Third Reich, cheese fanciers, gossip columnists and the Hollywood star system with equal and total frenzy.

Richard Condon was a visionary, a darkly comic conjurer, a student of American mythology and a master of conspiracy theories, as vividly demonstrated in 'The Manchurian Candidate'.

Richard Condon had a genuine disdain, outrage, and even hatred for many of the mainstream political corruptions that he found so prevalent in American life.

Richard Condon attacked his targets wholeheartedly but with a uniquely original style and wit that made almost any paragraph from one of his books instantly recognizable.

The arrival of a new novel by Richard Condon is like an invitation to a party.

Richard Condon was enamored of long lists of detailed trivia that, while at least marginally pertinent to the subject at hand, are almost always an exercise in gleeful exaggeration and joyful spirits.

All of Richard Condon's books have, to an unknown degree, the names of real people in them as characters, generally very minor or peripheral.

The real-life Heller made one needlework depiction of the manor house in Ireland in which Richard Condon was living at the time.

Richard Condon was a great friend of actor Allan Melvin, having written a nightclub act for him.

In Prizzi's Honor, a New York City policeman named McCarry is mentioned once; the political thriller writer Charles McCarry was a friend of Richard Condon's and, as a former operative of the CIA, was a occasional source of expertise in the field of espionage for Richard Condon.

Weiler, a film critic for The New York Times, was another friend of Richard Condon's who made several fictional appearances, usually as Abraham Weiler but sometimes as a Dr Abe Weiler.

Buchwald is certainly Art Buchwald, the celebrated newspaper columnist and humorist, who, at the time of the book's publication, was still working for The International Herald-Tribune, which was published in Paris, where Richard Condon had lived during the 1950s.

For many years a Hollywood publicity man for Walt Disney and other studios, Richard Condon took up writing relatively late in life and his first novel, The Oldest Confession, was not published until he was 43.

Still, over the next three decades Richard Condon produced works that returned him to favor, both with the critics and the book-buying public, such as Mile High, Winter Kills, and the first of the Prizzi books, Prizzi's Honor.

Richard Condon wrote about the apparent plagiarism on her website, but her discovery went unnoticed by most of the world until Adair Lara, a longtime San Francisco Chronicle staff writer, wrote a lengthy article about the accusation in 2003.

Reprinting the paragraphs in question, she solicited the opinion of a British forensic linguist, who concluded that Richard Condon had unquestionably plagiarized at least two paragraphs of Graves's work.

In Some Angry Angel, the book that followed The Manchurian Candidate, Richard Condon makes a direct reference to Graves.