Richard Condon books

Anthologies

Prizzi Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Richard Condon (1915-1996) was an American novelist who spent twenty-one years working as a film publicist before publishing his first novel at age forty-two. His debut, The Oldest Confession (1958), launched a writing career that produced twenty-six novels over nearly four decades. He lived for much of his later life in Ireland, Mexico, and Switzerland, settings that occasionally surfaced in his fiction.

Condon is best known for The Manchurian Candidate (1959), a Cold War thriller about a brainwashed Korean War veteran turned political assassin. The novel was adapted into a celebrated 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra and again in 2004 with Denzel Washington. His other major success was Prizzi’s Honor (1982), a dark comedy about a hit man in a Mafia family who falls for a woman in the same line of work. John Huston directed the 1985 film version, which won Anjelica Huston an Oscar.

Throughout his career, Condon returned to themes of political corruption, organized crime, and the absurdity of American power. Novels like Winter Kills (1974) and Mile High (1972) satirized the American establishment with a conspiratorial edge, while Emperor of America (1990) imagined a military coup in the United States. His prose style was sharp, cynical, and often blackly funny.