As if that weren't enough of a headache, Charley's also learned that she's been augmenting her income as a tax consultant by working as a freelance hitter, and that she's now been offered a contract by a family rival to do the number on him.
Condon attacked his targets, usually gangsters, financiers, and politicians, wholeheartedly but with a uniquely original style and wit that made almost any paragraph from one of his books instantly recognizable.
Reviewing one of his works in the International Herald Tribune, the well-known playwright George Axelrod (The Seven-Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter), who had collaborated with Condon on the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, wrote: "The arrival of a new novel by Richard Condon is like an invitation to a party.... the sheer gusto of the prose, the madness of his similies, the lunacy of his metaphors, his infectious, almost child-like joy in composing complex sentences that go bang at the end in the manner of exploding cigars is both exhilarating and as exhausting as any good party ought to be.
Nevertheless, on the first page of the book, we have Don Corrado Prizzi, the 84-year-old leader of the family, attending a wedding: He was asleep, but even in repose his face was as subtly distorted and burnished as that of a giant crown of thorns starfish predator.
Every few moments both small, sharp eyes, as merry as ice cubes, would open, make a reading, then close again.All of 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 was a television director in New York City in the 1950s, '60s, and 70s, who initially lived on Long Island and then moved to a house on Rockrimmon Road in Stamford, Connecticut.
His answer to that question, The Manchurian Candidate, the first of what has been a long string of best sellers for Mr. Condon, was one of the finest thrillers of recent times and perhaps the most darkly amusing look ever at the McCarthy era.