All 26 books were written in distinctive Condon style, which combined a fast pace, outrage, and frequent humor while focusing almost obsessively on monetary greed and political corruption.
Condon's writing was known for its complex plotting, fascination with trivia, and loathing for those in power; at least two of his books featured thinly disguised versions of Richard Nixon.
In Mile High, his eighth novel, one primarily about how a single spectacularly ruthless gangster named Eddie West imposes Prohibition upon an unwary populace, Condon sums up the theme of all his books in a single angry cri de coeur: Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck.
Frank Rich, for example, in his column in the "Sunday Opinion" of The New York Times of August 17, 2008, writes about Barack Obama with a reference to both a well-known actress and a well-known plot element (which he gets wrong) in the first movie version of Condon's 1959 book: [Obama's] been done in by that ad with Britney [Spears] and Paris [Hilton] and a new international crisis that allows [John] McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred.
Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III... and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.
He was also a visionary, a darkly comic conjurer, a student of American mythology and a master of conspiracy theories, as vividly demonstrated in 'The Manchurian Candidate'.
In a 1977 quotation, he said that:[8] ...people are being manipulated, exploited, murdered by their servants, who have convinced these savage, simple-minded populations that they are their masters, and that it hurts the head, if one thinks.
My novels are merely entertaining persuasions to get the people to think in other categories.With his long lists of absurd trivia and "mania for absolute details", Condon was, along with Ian Fleming, one of the early exemplars of those called by Pete Hamill in a New York Times review, "the practitioners of what might be called the New Novelism... Condon applies a dense web of facts to fiction....
Reviewing one of his works in the International Herald Tribune, 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 similes, 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.From his 1975 novel, Money Is Love, comes a fine example of the "lunacy of his metaphors": "Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.
[11]Condon was also 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.
In An Infinity of Mirrors, for instance, those in attendance of the funeral of a famous French actor and notable lover are delineated as: Seven ballerinas of an amazing spectrum of ages were at graveside.
Actresses of films, opera, music halls, the theatre, radio, carnivals, circuses, pantomimes, and lewd exhibitions mourned in the front line.
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.
In The Oldest Confession, a character has lunch in a Paris bistro and briefly meets two people playing chess at the bar, "Buchwald and Nolan, newspaper and airline peons respectively".
[16] For many years a Hollywood publicity man for Walt Disney and other studios, Condon took up writing relatively late in life and his first novel, The Oldest Confession, was not published until he was 43.
The first version, in 1962, which starred Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, followed the book with great fidelity, and is now highly regarded as a glimpse into the mindset of its era.
Janet Maslin, writing already over two decades ago, said in The New York Times in 1996 that it was "arguably the most chilling piece of cold war paranoia ever committed to film, yet by now it has developed a kind of innocence.
In 1998, a Californian software engineer noticed several paragraphs in The Manchurian Candidate that appeared nearly identical to portions of the celebrated 1934 novel I, Claudius by the English writer Robert Graves.