SOURCE: "Stalin Goes Hollywood," in The New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1992, pp. 9, 11.

Below, Westlake calls The Venerable Bead "a lot of fun, loose-jointed, manic, over the top from first word to last."

Richard Condon has always been way out there on the cutting edge between prescience and lunacy. In toughly comic novels from The Manchurian Candidate to Prizzi's Honor and beyond, he has reflected the real world through a slightly distorting mirror in which our near future grins back at us, without comfort. In such books, there's tight and brilliant control over story, over character, over Mr. Condon's own savagely satirical instinct. But from time to time his irritation boils over, and out of him comes whirling a fictional doomsday machine, mowing down everything in its wake, from our most pious political platitudes to the entire best-seller list. Now, in the twilight of spydom, with sovereign nations...