Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Condon, Richard (Vol. 100) - Charles McCarry (obituary date 10 April 1996)

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Charles McCarry (obituary date 10 April 1996)

SOURCE: "Storyteller for a World Gone Mad," in Washington Post, April 10, 1996, p. C1.

[Below, McCarry reminisces about Condon's most significant novels and his contribution to the genre.]

Richard Condon, who died yesterday in Dallas, the city of cities in the world atlas of conspiracies, was to paranoia what Tennyson was to melancholy, a writer of powerful and utterly unique imaginative gifts who transmuted a form of madness into the intellectual coinage of his time and place.

In his second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, arguably the best thriller ever written, Condon turned the certainties of Eisenhower-era America upside down with a tale of a made-in-China political assassin with an Electra complex. Like insanity itself, the story was deeply terrifying but also wildly funny.

What had seemed merely a good, amusing read when the book was published in 1959 became all too...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John F. Baker (interview date 24 June 1983)
   2. John Skow (review date 22 September 1986)
   3. Michael Neill (essay date 8 December 1986)
   4. Roderick Mann (essay date 16 August 1987)
   5. Charles Champlin (review date 18 September 1988)
   6. Vincent Patrick (review date 9 October 1988)
   7. Jonathan Yardley (review date 7 February 1990)
   8. Ray Blount Jr. (review date 11 February 1990)
   9. Herbert Mitgang (review date 14 February 1990)
   10. Carolyn See (review date 26 February 1990)
   11. Sarah Booth Conroy (review date 10 May 1990)
   12. Alex Heard (review date 10 September 1991)
   13. Herbert Mitgang (review date 18 September 1991)
   14. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 September 1992)
   15. Jay Cantor (review date 29 November 1992)
   16. Herbert Mitgang (review date 2 December 1992)
   17. Donald E. Westlake (review date 13 December 1992)
   18. Joe Queenan (review date 6 February 1994)
   19. Chris Petrakos (review date 20 February 1994)
   20. Lorrie K. Inagaki (review date Summer 1994)
   21. Mel Gussow (obituary date 10 April 1996)
   22. Charles McCarry (obituary date 10 April 1996)
   23. Myrna Oliver (obituary date 10 April 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright