SOURCE: "Richard Condon, Political Novelist, Dies at 81," in The New York Times, April 10, 1996, p. A16.

In the following obituary, Gussow reviews Condon's literary career and life.

Richard Condon, the fiendishly inventive novelist and political satirist who wrote The Manchurian Candidate, Winter Kills and Prizzi's Honor, among other books, died yesterday at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. He was 81.

Novelist is too limited a word to encompass the world of Mr. Condon. 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. That novel, published in 1959, subsequently became a cult film classic, directed by John Frankenheimer. In this spellbinding story, Raymond Shaw, an American prisoner of war (played in the film by Laurence Harvey), is brainwashed and becomes a Communist agent and assassin.

When the 1962 film was re-released in 1988, Janet Maslin wrote in...