15. Richard Condon: thrillers on speed
Once upon a time, after growing up in Hell's Kitchen, NYC, and doing his stint in the merchant marine, Condon settled for the hectic life of a Hollywood publicist and agent. His boss, Max E. Youngstein at United Artists, skimmed his salary, banked it for him, and then sacked him, telling him to go look at the sea in Mexico and write the novel he had been promising.
Condon's second effort was The Manchurian Candidate (1959), which suitably reframed into an almost-conventional thriller, was filmed in 1962 (and remade in 2004 — though stick with the John Frankenheimer version). Condon needed never to work again.
But he did — I think his total oeuvre runs in excess of two dozen books. He drove deeper and deeper into the phantasmagoria of American conspiracy theory. Just as The Manchurian Candidate mined the hysteria of the Cold War, he later took on the Kennedy years, and the mafia (towards the end of his writing career, and not up to his best, four books on the Prizzi family).
Time and again Condon excoriates political corruption and how it destroys. In Manchurian Candidate, the mother-figure uses her damaged son to bring about an assassination which would make her husband the presidential candidate — the villain behind the curtain is thinly-disguised Senator Joe McCarthy. In Winter Kills (1974) a substitute 'Honey Fitz' machinates the assassination of his JFK-like son. Perhaps too often there a sexual perversity at work, as well: incest is implied in Manchurian Candidate (a posthumous study showed Condon, there, had ripped bits from Livia in Robert Graves's I Claudius).
If any one motive was the driving force, it was Condon's visceral disgust at power-games, power-exploitation in the leading political families and for Richard Nixon in particular. That is most evident in the central character of Death of a Politician (1978). Trump would have been grist to his mill.
I'm picking just one of his works, and not an obvious one:
Mile High (1969) — which was put in the shade by Mario Puzo's similar, (and this is a strange thing to say about any Condon story) more sensationalist
The Godfather.It's another generational novel: a triple-decker — the three unequal parts are The Minotaur; Theseus and Wife; and The Labyrinth. There is a positive morass of characters, quit a number of excesive vices, and a smattering of over-the-top virtues and their singnallers.
Paddy West is the grandfather, in Famine Ireland:
The blight came on in ’45. The famine began in ’46. Dysentery and relapsing fever followed. Thousands roamed the countryside praying for food, eating thistles to stay alive. They began to leak out of their country. First to Liverpool, Glasgow and South Wales, then to Australia, last but most powerfully to the United States, jammed starving and diseased into unseaworthy ships.
A million died at home before Paddy West got away, including three brothers and four sisters. The British at last had begun to issue corn, but the Irish didn’t know what it was and most of them couldn’t or wouldn’t eat it. Paddy filled his pants and a sack with it and made himself eat it after he saw how they cooked it, but on the road from Killarney to Cork he preferred to eat weeds. But he had luck. He came on two drunken English soldiers and in the right place for it, so he clomped them both on the heads with a flat rock and found six shillings in their pockets, all unaware that he had started on his life’s work. He ate the corn, cooked or raw, and watched for lonely soldier drunks at night until he earned enough for his Cunard passage — about twenty American dollars’ worth.
Paddy West then involves himself in the seamiest aspects of New York life — and (for me) sketches a dystopic criminal and political corruption. West rises though 'crimping' — shanghai-ing crews for ships on behalf of Ma 'the Casker' Steinet — and politicking with Tammany Hall:
After Ma died Paddy set his course for politics [...]. He leased the three boardinghouses to Charley Gleason. He sold the slop shops to Larry Meagher, and over the twenty-two years with Ma and his bands of fancy girls and his various overrides he had saved forty-one thousand dollars and he now owned leases and buildings and land. When he burned the boardinghouses that stood between Fulton and Wall Streets after the leases expired, he collected another three thousand in insurance. He built tenements on the land with a good bank loan that the Party arranged for him at fair rates.
With all that comes money. Paddy sires Eddie on a Mafia bride. Eddie is cultured into being a businessman:
Edward Courance West at twenty-one became the youngest bank president in the history of the state. The bank was three blocks west of Tammany Hall, which had moved uptown from Franklin and Nassau in ’68. To install his son, Paddy had torn down the building the street-level store was in and built a four-story edifice, with a vault for the sweet little bank whose capital was now eight million, two hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars and eleven cents (as of the 1909 year-end audit).
When Paddy died suddenly after a lifetime without a sick day, Eddie was twenty-three years old: March 24, 1911.
Paddy dies in the company of Willie Tobin, who continues as the father and son's go-fer to the end. Eddie is the central part of the story. He comes up with the ultimate heist:
To Edward Courance West the prohibition of alcohol was merely the greatest business opportunity since the Industrial Revolution. He did not see it as an infringement of rights [...] All he saw, very simply, was a chance to make two or three billion dollars and to evade taxes on all but a minuscule fraction of it.
While agitating for prohibition, Eddie has also squared Don Vito of the Sicilian mafia to provide the labour to distribute illegal hooch. Which led to involvement in organised labour (or rather exploiting it).
Eddie's marriage turns sour: his ultra-Catholic wife is appalled at his violence to prostitutes (this, as only happens in fiction, will coincidentally return in the final section of the novel). Eddie becomes convinced his partner is having an affair with her (Eddie convinces himself it is all part of a Commie plot). He catches them together, and destroys his house out on Long Island. The wife dies in childbirth. Eddie abjures the child. Etc., etc.
Eddie falls for a chorus-girl, sets her up in an apartment, only to find she betrays him with the 'companion' Eddie had arranged to watch her. Eddie goes totally nuts. All this, and much more.
The story then changes gear. With Eddie out of his mind, we move to the third generation. Walter (named for his maternal grandfather) has a complex history. He serves as a rifleman in Korea, becomes a priest, then a respected architect, never a criminal. And, obviously, a meg-millionaire on the back of his inheritance and then Eddie's management of his funds. He marries Mayra Ashant, an artist on a West scholarship. When Mayra is told Walt is the son and heir of Eddie:
Mayra had felt cold hostility cover her like hair spray and hold her in a rigid net. He was the son of the West Foundation. They’d been together for three months and she had thought they’d been everything it was possible to be to each other, but he had been afraid she would find out who he was, because she was black and he was ashamed of her. So many things he did habitually began to convince her more and more that he had just been using her until he got tired of using her. Like the way he was so cheap, pretending to like Swiss champagne more than French, or always taking buses, or having two suits of clothes to his back, all so she wouldn’t think he was that rich man’s son and try to take him the way he figured that’s what she’d do the minute she found out. And the way he babbled about astrology, and theosophy and faith cures and nature healing, just like he was some goddam idiot who never got out of grade school and who had to cover up and show off like a little boy how smart he was, all so she wouldn’t know he was that rich man’s son with a mess of colleges behind him. And how he never knew anything about the West Foundation. And the way he’d look at her Foundation check when it came on the first of every month and keep turning it over in his hands and looking at both sides of it and saying he’d get it cashed for her. Then when she packed his goddam bag she found all three Foundation checks tucked right in there, never used, like he thought his rich goddam honkie father could trace them to a nigger girl if he cashed them.
Then another Condon twist:
The news that Edward Courance West’s younger son had been ordained in the priesthood after service in the Korean war had made a large forty-eight-hour splash in the papers. Walter even cooperated to keep the comment strident because he hoped it would flush his father out, but West remained silent and invisible. Then, to get out of the spotlight, [...] Walt was whisked out of sight to become pastor of a tiny parish in the back country of New Mexico, to work with a congregation of Mescalero Indians. He and his flock got along fine. Walt was a good priest and because he was rich, he provided, as a good shepherd should—a new hospital, community tools, a roof for the school. He was happier than he had ever been. People were calling upon him for love and service. He expanded and fulfilled himself.
Then, without warning, five months after he had been installed, his father began to write long letters to him; intimate, fervent, embarrassing letters that repeated over and over how much it meant that his son had taken holy orders, then had expanded that mission of his life into beatitudes of meaning for Edward West’s mother and Edward West’s wife, who were then in heaven glorying in the presence of God, rejoicing with Edward West in the knowledge that Walt was allowing all of them to serve him through a devout son.
Eddie rediscovers his lost son, and writes long letters:
Mr. West ordered Walt to pray for his immortal soul. Very soon the letters specified the combinations of litanies that were required. The litanies became so complicated that Walt was sure that his father had called upon the hundreds of obligations among bishops, mothers superior, cardinals, the entire curia (including the Pope), for obscure, long, wearying and obfuscating forms of prayers.
This devotion takes over Walt's life. Eddie snows the community with money; and destoys Walt's ministry. Another corruption by money.
Back in the secular world, Walt falls for a young Black artist, Mayra Ashant. Eddie becomes obsessed by her, has her obsessively filmed and recorded. Mayra discovers who Walt is, the heir to the West wealth:
Mayra had felt cold hostility cover her like hair spray and hold her in a rigid net. He was the son of the West Foundation. They’d been together for three months and she had thought they’d been everything it was possible to be to each other, but he had been afraid she would find out who he was, because she was black and he was ashamed of her.
She flees. Walt follows. They are reconciled, and marry. Walt and Mayra, now pregnant, are summoned to Eddie's estate for Christmas. That will mean passing through New York and encountering Mayra's mother; and she knows Eddie's treatment of black whores. At the estate, Eddie is having Mayra injected with what are called tranquillizers, but are in fact mind-altering drugs. Mayra is having fantasies.
Willie Tobin (remember him?) is there to protect Mayra. It all comes together in a cataclysmic final scene. Willie is fed to Eddie's man-killer hounds. Eddie then advances on Mayra, armed with a poker (pokers had appeared earlier in the violence of the crimping episode) only to collapse with a coronary.
Yes: all melodrama. But on the way Condon packs in a remarkble amount of history of the criminal life if New York. And that's what I was there for.
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